Diego Gonzalez's Shell Scripts Get Your Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 Live Streaming in No Time Flat

Maker Diego Gonzalez has offered a quick-start guide to anyone looking at working with the new Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3, demonstrating how it can be used to live stream video to Twitch — using a series of handy shell scripts.

"This is a simple-to-use tool to stream on Twitch or other streaming services from a Raspberry Pi and the new Camera Module 3," Gonzalez explains. "There are a lot of projects like this online, [but] the problem is that most of them use the old raspivid [software] which is not supported any more. That's why I created this project, adapting old programs to the new [libcamera] library."

The Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 was launched earlier this year, bringing a resolution boost and the family's first motorized autofocus system — along with support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) captures. It's also the first model to exclusively use the new libcamera software stack, meaning it's entirely incompatible with camera software developed for Raspberry Pi OS releases prior to Bullseye.

To work around that, Gonzalez has adapted older guides to create a trio of shell scripts centered around the new libcamera library. The first streams pure video, with no audio at all; the second adds a music file; and the third connects to a microphone to provide a live video-and-audio streaming system suitable for use on Twitch.

"You can use this in many situations like bird or plant watching, a podcast, or many things," Gonzalez writes, demonstrating its flexibility with a variant built into a project box with posable camera mount and USB microphone. "It can even be made portable for streaming outside."

Gonzalez's full guide is now available on Instructables, with the shell scripts published to GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.