So your approach could definitely work and is perfectly fine for small scale but you’re essentially serving video, which could also be done with serving a video stream. The pros about serving an actual video stream is that you can transform the 1-2MB per jpeg (which could roughly sum up to 10-30MB per sec if you want to serve realtime video of 10-15 fps) to a couple of bytes per second as you’re only sending the changes between frames. (There was a cool talk about how to achieve this which you can find here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNe5dmRP9Cc ). The TL;DR is to use ffmpeg which will accept a stream of bytes to convert to a video stream in realtime which you would serve with something like ffplay. I guess a nice headache to actually get to work for now.
The other streaming/chunking a http request suggestion above is also not that far off the mark and maybe even more preferable because it’s a proven code path and a lot more lightweight. See here an plug which you should be able to use https://github.com/elixir-vision/picam/blob/master/examples/picam_http/lib/picam_http/streamer.ex
and a thread about it within this forum: Nerves device as an IP Camera?
Idea here is that there is a special content type for this kind of ‘animated jpeg’ that the browser understands, you just create an img and point it at a url which serves a stream of jpegs through ‘multipart/x-mixed-replace’.
The browser will keep the connection open and wait for new image frames (in the form of jpg images) that will be served by your plug/server.
Keep in mind that if this existing code works for you, it’s fine! But the last described method could be pretty easy to implement. Good luck!
