[Libav-user] Writing an rtsp-consuming application - introduction

[Ferdinand Jacobs]

Hi Nick!

I think it would help if you used wireshark and examined the RTSP packets to see what is going on. It could be that your camera needs a GET_PARAMETER and times out. That's not very hard to implement by the way. 

For the encoding part, I'm still struggling with that myself as there are no tutorials for that subject, and it's kind of hard for someone who isn't very experienced to just dive into ffmpeg.c ... ( I have to encode h264 video from a camera to mpeg4 )
So if you find any on that, let me know. : )

Greetings Ferdinand

Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:54:41 -0400
From: eveningnick1 at gmail.com
To: libav-user at ffmpeg.org
Subject: [Libav-user] Writing an rtsp-consuming application - introduction

Hello
I have faced with a task to develop an application that has to receive an RTSP (audio + h.264 video) stream from an Axis IP camera. Basically what I need to do is to consume this stream reliably (i.e., I can't afford my application to crash if there's some network delay) and export it into a file + decode video and do some processing on decoded frames.

Searching in google and through the mailing list, I have found a lot of complaints about the fact that ffmpeg application (not the libavformat library itself, as i understand) has some issues with receiving RTSP stream (carried by UDP packets). 
I actually launched ffmpeg trying to see how it actually works "out-of-the-box":
./ffmpeg/ffmpeg -i 'rtsp://a11.l1857056010.c18570.g.lq.akamaistream.net/D/11/18570/v0001/reflector:56010' -vcodec copy -acodec copy -t 3600 -y 'nasa.mp4'

(this is NASA translation)and after few minutes (or seconds) of recording I get some kind of error or ffmpeg just stops recording and quits.Well I have a lot to learn and I hope this issue is caused by the application and not by the library itself.

What I would like to do now - is to do some experiments and write a simple application that can connect to the RTSP server and start "reading" the stream, transforming it into a series of AVFrame's that I could display using SDL, or edit and save/export.

I've played with ffmpeg and SDL (thanks to an awesome Stephen Dranger's tutorial) for a while, so far. But that is, of course, not enough.I have found documentation for the RTSP-related functions of libavformat: http://ffmpeg.org/doxygen/0.6/rtsp_8h.html but as a newbie I couldn't build a working application that can retrieve the stream. I don't even know in what order to call these functions. I'd use ffmpeg.c as an example, but it seems to be huge, I am getting lost in it.

Can you point me in the right direction? Maybe a similar question has been answered already, but I missed this answer?How are streaming applications like the one i need to create, built usually (what kind of architecture the applications should have)? How a simple streaming application? Do the problems with the ffmpeg library (unreliability of RTSP recording) extend on libavformat?

I am sorry for unspecific questions (I believe the answer would require a whole article to be written :) ), but basically I am asking for a simple sketch and basic ideas I need to delve into.

Thank you for everyone who will find some time to respond!



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