What steps are needed to stream RTSP from FFmpeg?

Question

What steps are needed to stream RTSP from FFmpeg?

Streaming UDP is not a problem, but as I want to stream to mobile devices which can natively read RTSP streams, I couldn't find any setup which tells what exactly is needed. Do I need an RTSP streaming server like LIVE555 or can I use FFmpeg only?

My Command:

ffmpeg -i space.mp4 -vcodec libx264 -tune zerolatency -crf 18 -f rtsp -muxdelay 0.1 rtsp://192.168.1.200:1234

I get an Input/Output error.

Do I need a SDP description to use RTSP? And if yes where do I have to put it?

Answer 1

You can use FFserver to stream a video using RTSP.

Just change console syntax to something like this:

ffmpeg -i space.mp4 -vcodec libx264 -tune zerolatency -crf 18 http://localhost:1234/feed1.ffm

Create a ffserver.config file (sample) where you declare HTTPPort, RTSPPort and SDP stream. Your config file could look like this (some important stuff might be missing):

HTTPPort 1234
RTSPPort 1235

<Feed feed1.ffm>
        File /tmp/feed1.ffm
        FileMaxSize 2M
        ACL allow 127.0.0.1
</Feed>

<Stream test1.sdp>
    Feed feed1.ffm
    Format rtp
    Noaudio
    VideoCodec libx264
    AVOptionVideo flags +global_header
    AVOptionVideo me_range 16
    AVOptionVideo qdiff 4
    AVOptionVideo qmin 10
    AVOptionVideo qmax 51
    ACL allow 192.168.0.0 192.168.255.255
</Stream>

With such setup you can watch the stream with i.e. VLC by typing:

rtsp://192.168.0.xxx:1235/test1.sdp

Here is the FFserver documentation.

Answer 2

An alternative that I used instead of FFServer was Red5 Pro, on Ubuntu, I used this line: ffmpeg -f pulse -i default -f video4linux2 -thread_queue_size 64 -framerate 25 -video_size 640x480 -i /dev/video0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -bsf:v h264_mp4toannexb -profile:v baseline -level:v 3.2 -c:v libx264 -x264-params keyint=120:scenecut=0 -c:a aac -b:a 128k -ar 44100 -f rtsp -muxdelay 0.1 rtsp://localhost:8554/live/paul