It it possible to output imshow as a video to a shared drive?

I use a shared network drive with my team mates. Is it possible to output my cv2.imshow to the shared drive, so that the teammates can see the live stream?

I’ve seen several tutorials online, but it seems like the output html can only be viewed on local host?

Thanks for your advice!

You have tagged this post with Python, and last time I checked, OpenCv on Python or C++ do not create HTML or any other browser output - but JavaScript does.

Shared drive is for sharing files, which drawing on a browser window does not produce. Your questin is really a generic one: how to share a browser screen? Today, the easiest way would be to use a meeting application such as Zoom or Teams or Google Meet- not on your shared drive, but over Internet.

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Hi Matti, thank you for your reply.
I am trying to stream the opencv output to a html file using Flask. Ultimately, I am hoping to achieve the following:

(1) take a live video
(2) analyse for motion and add some annotation
(3) show the output via cv2.imshow
(4) finally, publish the output animation on a html page (accessible by team mates on demand over a intranet/network drive).

this has been tried by a lot of folks, and it seems a bad idea (dont do that!)

  • no control how to stop / start streams
  • not “multi-client”
  • needs a webserver with a public ip (you cant host it in the cloud (no webcam) also not on your own box (NAT routing, noone outside your loc3al network sees you))

again, a shared drive is still a drive. you can put images or video files there, but you cannot “host streams” like that.

if your opencv has support for gstreamer builtin, look up how to build a server pipeline (and use it with VideoWriter)

bad usage of words seems to be the biggest problem.

  • “html file” → “something accessible with a browser” (not a file)
  • “shared drive” → “something on the LAN/intranet” (not a literal network drive)

these are different things. the inability to tell these things apart indicates insufficient understanding of basic technology.

perhaps you should explain what it is you’re trying to show to your colleagues.