Background

We all have our own Moby Dick. My elusive white whale was connecting to the camera of this drone I got to play with in coding bootcamp. No one had been able to do it. Sure, you could download the app that lets you fly and record with the drone, but I wanted to tap directly into the video feed. After scouring the internet for a few hours I found a clue and from there was able to get the right tools and stream that feed to my computer. Here’s how you do it, step by step.

1. Install FFmpeg with homebrew

here’s a link to a walk through:
Installing FFmpeg
Or you can just run this command if you have brew installed.

$ brew install ffmpeg --with-ffplay

2. Connect to your drone

Connect to your drone’s wifi and go to the following address in your browser:
http://192.168.1.1:5555/
If your browser starts downloading something, you’re doing it right. That’s the video. It isn’t usable to you yet but that’s the stream you’re trying to connect to.

Cancel the download.

3. Use ffmpeg to target that feed

Here’s where the two meet. FFmpeg can make sense of the video feed and actually play it back for you with the FFplay tool you selected in the install. To see the feed just type in your terminal:

$ ffplay http://192.168.1.1:5555

You should get some messages and then a window will pop open with the drone’s front camera feed. I’d imagine the other camera has a different port number but I’ll leave that for you to decide.