Borescope camera video stream rewriter

This tool rewrites the video stream from a wi-fi borescope camera as described in my blog post Rewriting the video stream from a wi-fi borescope camera.

It fixes the borescope's intentional stream corruption and produces output suitable for use in standard video tools such as ffmpeg that read MJPEG streams. Credit for identifying the method of intentional corruption goes to Michael Karr et al.

Dependencies

Run

This tool runs on POSIX systems. So far, macOS is tested.

Build

The ragel regular language parser generator must be installed.

On macOS, install ragel with Homebrew:

brew install ragel

Build by running make borescope_stream.

Usage

This program is designed to be used in a pipeline. It accepts a stream on stdin and writes raw or transformed data to stdout. It writes parsed headers and image information to stderr.

The following pipeline acquires video from the camera, logs the raw stream to a file for later playback, rewrites the stream in real time, and displays video. A named pipe is used because ffplay only reads files and does not accept input on stdin.

Note that ffplay is only required if you want to watch the video with ffplay. Feel free to not watch the video, or to use replace ffplay with your preferred tool for viewing MJPEG streams.

mkfifo vid.fifo
nc 192.168.10.123 7060 \
    | tee v.log \
    | /path/to/borescope_stream --jpeg >vid.fifo & \
    ffplay -hide_banner -loglevel error -f mjpeg vid.fifo

Command-line options

• --jpeg - write stripped JPEG stream to stdout.
• --write-files - write stripped JPEG frames from the input stream to individually numbered files.