I've been trying to set up a reliable lightweight solution for high quality, low-latency webcam (v4l2) streaming from Linux server to browsers, allowing for small (1-5) number of concurrent viewers.

The obvious choice here is WebRTC, which when used through browser APIs, works wonderfully. It has low latency and automatic quality adjustment depending on network performance.
I also checked out RTSP and RTMP, which are not supported without browser plugins. Next candidates were DASH and HLS, but while they provide high quality, they also have high latency.
For a while I used MPEG1 streaming through Websockets (using jsmpeg library), which worked and had low latency, but the video quality was bad.

Back to WebRTC - It seems like reliable, lightweight and maintained projects are really hard to find. So far I've found a few WebRTC media servers, but they're overkill for my use case:

• Janus
• MediaSoup
• Kurento (unmaintained)

I also tried implementing this functionality using low level Gstreamer elements in Python using PyGObject, but that's proving to be rather complicated with a ton of extremely low level implementation details.

If anyone has tried doing something similar, I'd really like to hear what (if any) problems you had and if you found any sane solutions. Next thing on my list is using headless Chromium in combination with Puppeteer, but I'd really prefer more lightweight solutions.