Thanks for your contribution! Haven't look through the code yet but I'm having my doubts whether this belongs here. When developing with ROS, I always try to follow a principle which says that a node should perform a single logical function. In case of web_video_server, it's streaming image topics to the web. Instead of adding this functionality to web_video_server, wouldn't you rather create a separate node for converting point clouds to images and run it together with web_video_server?

You make a good point, and I generally approach ROS the same way. However, after trying several different approaches for converting pointclouds to images, I settled on this addition to web_video_server as the best solution for my needs. Take a look at the code before you rule it out. I was able to mostly isolate the pointcloud2 stuff to a single independent class. Further, I think I improved the organization of streamers/subscribers witihin web_video_server beyond the addition of the pointcloud2 class.

A little background. We are remotely controlling our robot over a very low bandwidth connection (< 50 Mb/s). As a result, direct access to ros images is questionable and direct access to lidar data is out of the question. We started using web_video_server to reduce the bandwidth requirements for our driving cameras and it made a big difference. Later when we needed to access lidar data, we created a standalong pointcloud to image publisher to leverage image compression. The approach worked but was clunky in the sense that we kept adding more and more image publisher nodes for all the different frames of reference and maps we wanted access to. In additional, all of those nodes were running regardless of current use by the remote computer. This implementation within web_video_server allows us to remotely start and stop pointcloud to image processing as needed while also changing critical setting through changes to the http call. No need to anticipate topics or independently change parameters in third party nodes.

Sorry for the delay. I will try to finally reserve some time to push this further.

Further, I think I improved the organization of streamers/subscribers witihin web_video_server beyond the addition of the pointcloud2 class.

Could you split the refactor of streamers/subscribers into a separate PR?

I can work on that.

@Nosille You may want to look at #192 .

Nice! There seems to be a lot of overlap between what I tried to accomplish with my refactor and the plugin approach. I will look into what it would take to make my stuff compatible.