Revision history [back]

I found a way to pipe a stream to VideoCapture for windows, because openCV is based on FFmpeg, that supports named pipe.

Here is a quick example:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import cv2
import win32pipe, win32file
from threading import Thread

def runPipe():    
        p = win32pipe.CreateNamedPipe(r'\\.\pipe\myNamedPipe',
                                        win32pipe.PIPE_ACCESS_DUPLEX,
                                        win32pipe.PIPE_TYPE_MESSAGE | win32pipe.PIPE_WAIT,
                                        1, 1024, 1024, 0, None)        
        win32pipe.ConnectNamedPipe(p, None)    
        with open("D:\\Streams\\mystream.ts", 'rb') as input:
            while True:
                data = input.read(1024)
                if not data:
                    break
                win32file.WriteFile(p, data)                

def extract():
    cap = cv2.VideoCapture(r'\\.\pipe\myNamedPipe')    
    fnum = 0
    while(True):
        # Capture frame-by-frame
        ret, frame = cap.read()                                                                             
        print fnum, "pts:", cap.get(cv2.cv.CV_CAP_PROP_POS_MSEC)
        fnum = fnum + 1                
    # When everything done, release the capture
    cap.release()   

if __name__ == "__main__":    
    thr = Thread(target=extract)
    thr.start()
    runPipe()
    print "bye"