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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T11:28:06+00:00

What protocols do web cameras use for streaming audio/video feeds over the internet? HTTP?

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What protocols do web cameras use for streaming audio/video feeds over the internet? HTTP? TCP? How is each frame sent inside the protocol? For example, if they use HTTP, does the web cam software encode each frame and tack it on as a query string parameter like:

http://www.some-url.com?encoded-frame=WJDJ84FU84F85594DK3DK

or, is the encoded frame set as the HTTP request’s body? Similar question for TCP or any other protocol that is used.

I’m asking because I’d like to stream a web cam to a web server and have software that receives each encoded frame, decodes it, and does something with it. Thanks in advance.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Well the question in OP is open ended because it’s not like there is ‘one fixed set of protocols(TCP/UDP)’ used in this kind of applications and also its scope is large, due to various technologies involved in this end-to-end solution of Camera capturem encoding , streaming, decoding/processing. In the case you mentioned if it is going to be likely that the webcam and the Web server are going to be on same LAN, then well you can as well use TCP/IP and then server can process it. Because on LAN latencies won’t be high, so TCP would serve good. Else if on WAN, then UDP/IP can be of help.
    There are plenty of tutorials online to get basics of using TCP/IP or UDP/IP sockets and its programming concepts. Then there are tutorials about streaming, packetization etc of Video data.

    I don’t see how HTTP can be of use here to send from webcam to a server.

    For starters

    http://streaminglearningcenter.com/streaming-video-consulting.html

    Hope this is good to get you started.

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