Possible to stream live-video with (almost) zero-lag using RPi 2B accessible via browser?

Question

I'm an apprentice for becoming an IT specialist. My colleagues and me are trying to set up a Raspberry Pi in order to stream live video in 720p with (near to) zero-lag which has to be accessible via browser, so no viewer has to install additional software. We want to buy a RPi 4 and a Logitech Webcam to do this, but atm we are testing getting this done with an old RPi 2B. We use XAMPP to host an Apache server on Windows 10 and motion on the RPi to capture the video. With motion's ressource hungry motion detection we are only able to get 4 fps at best at 1024x768, so I'd like to know:

Can the additional power of the Raspberry Pi 4 handle motion so well that we achieve what we want? Can someone recommend an alternative solution for our project (like using something similar to motion or a completely different approach), keeping in mind that the stream HAS TO be accessible via browser without any additional software?

Thanks in advance for any help (and please excuse my bad English)!

Answer 1

In case you don't need audio you can always use mjpg-streamer.
But it has some limitations that I personally don't like. That is why I wrote my own Pi Improved Camera Streaming (PICS). It does basically the same and works with the Pi Camera and USB cameras.

The benefits are:

• The camera is turned of, if noone is watching the stream.
• Allows for multiple cameras to be streamed at once.
• Uses Raspbery Pi's hardware JPEG encoding to reduce CPU usage from alsmost 100% to 11% on a Raspberry Pi 1.

I am not sure if Raspberry Pi 4 offers hardware JPEG encoding in VideoCore VI. So there you might need to fall back to software encoding which removes the latter benefit.