My team discovered today that the reason why our vision code on the Raspberry Pi wasn’t working despite our NetworkTables being set up correctly as far as we could tell. The problem was that we were trying to view the video stream in Internet Explorer, which for some reason couldn’t handle a video stream. We used Chrome instead and were able to see a video feed!
We had assumed that we should use Internet Explorer to see the stream since screenstepslive said to use it when connecting to the roboRIO to do stuff like imaging Talons. Turns out, Internet Explorer isn’t always the solution!
Moral of the story: if your vision code should be sending a stream to the driver’s station but you’re not getting one, try using Chrome.
How is this relative to NetworkTables? Network tables allows you to send key/value pairs between different nodes on the network. Video streams are completely separate from and don’t rely on NetworkTables.
This is CameraServer related, not NetworkTables. Internet Explorer does not have the ability to view MJPEG streams. Use a different browser (Firefox, Chrome, and Edge all work). We’ll get this added to the documentation. Note this also isn’t an issue if you use a different application (e.g. SmartDashboard) to view the stream.
My team had thought that we were having issues with our NetworkTables, and we actually weren’t because we were using the wrong browser. I posted this with the title being about NetworkTables so if another team was having the same issues as us and searching CD they would be more likely to find this thread.
And the reason that you need to use Internet Explorer with the RoboRio is because Chrome does not support Microsoft Silverlight. In fact, Microsoft has announced they aren’t going to support it anymore either in the future.