According to the camera docs the encoding happens on the Raspberry Pi’s GPU, not on the camera module, so you need to ensure that the GPU is sufficent.

According to the specs published on wikipedia RPi Zero W has built-in 1080p30 or 1080p60 encoder (depending on the SoC).

We as the Membrane Team have never tested the RPi Zero W but it seems that it should work.

I can’t say for sure when RTMP will be implemented.

Membrane is project-driven to avoid implementing unnecessary or badly designed stuff so we prioritise features required by the projects that we develop as Software Mansion (a company behind Membrane).

We do have a project that requires RTMP in the backlog that is supposed to start very soon, but it is not 100% confirmed yet.

You can rely on ffmpeg for RTMP, and it’s a common practice to fill the gaps in membrane by doing so. Even we do this in some projects and later we replace ffmpeg parts with Membrane elements once they’re ready.

RPi camera module has quite specific programming interface. In order to call it from Elixir directly we would have needed to port GitHub - waveform80/picamera: A pure Python interface to the Raspberry Pi camera module · GitHub to Elixir.

Unless you strive for 100%-Elixir code or need to process the streams in sophisticated manner it might be easier to just call command-line raspivid that ships with the camera, then pick up the H.264 file that is being recorded and pass it to the ffmpeg.

It is a bit rough approach and won’t allow to do any advanced processing but should do the basic job and be good enough to validate the idea. Hopefully in the meantime we release the missing elements.

The Rpi Zero W is absolutely powerful enough for Nerves

As for video streaming, in my experiments I had to limit the size of the video to 640x480 to keep latency low and the video fluid, but I was using WebRTC and running a full (headless) Chromium browser, so not the most efficient option out there…

I suspect that with a more efficient setup you could achieve better results. I never tried Membrane, it sounds great.