Starting with the livestreamer player example I was able to move away from a very hacky bash script to something in python. This involved reading lots of examples for gstreamer and figuring out if they were for gstreamer 0.1 or 1.0, reading the corresponding documentation and simply giving it a try.

The overall approach is quite simple. The example simply shows the stream using gstreamer's appbin. appbin is replaced by a custom pipeline which allows me to do two things:

• limit to one frame per second
• analyze the raw frame in the python script instead of displaying it

That custom gstreamer pipeline currently looks like this:

uridecodebin -> videorate (limit to 1 fps) -> appsink

the uridecodebin element is fed with data from the live stream, and the appsink provides a raw buffer. Now what's left to be done is to actually compare the current frame with the reference frame, and to publish the result in some way.