Using Raspivid with a SSH tunnel

Question

I can successfully stream using

raspivid -o - -t 0 -w 640 -h 480 -fps 30 |cvlc -vvv stream:///dev/stdin --sout '#standard{access=http,mux=ts,dst=:8160}' :demux=h264

and I can view the stream in VLC using http://[RPI_IP]:8160 from my Windows 10 PC at home.

I'd like this to use the school's Wifi. Which is really locked down. I got the Rpi onto the school network. I can ssh out from the Rpi to my Linux workstation but all ports going to Wifi connections are blocked. I can reverse tunnel from the Rpi to the Linux PC for a SSH connection back to the RPi.

ssh -R 2200:localhost:22 -R 8160:localhost:8160 USER@HOSTNAME

The Linux PC connects fine with

ssh -p 2200 pi@localhost

The problem is VLC can not connect to http://localhost:8160

The debugging output says the packets are forwarded but the connection was refused on port 8160. I'd tried various combinations of -g,-t,-X, and adding the *: to the tunneling parameters. I even tried moving the -R parameter for 8160 to the ssh connection back to the Rpi via the 2200 tunnel.

I feel like it may have to do with the way I pipe raspivid to cvlc. That command was modified from other posts here. I'm not clear if the --sout part needs to be tweaked.

Answer 1

This was a lesson in how finicky the RPi0 camera cable and connector can be. I tried raspistill and got a no camera error. The tiny cable that comes with the red and white official Rpi0 case came loose during transport on both of my bots. I had to mess with it a bit and tape the cable on the camera module side to stay perfectly straight. The reverse tunneling works now.