What is this RTSP thing?

RTSP is a application level protocol designed for controlling delivery of data with real-time properties. The data is such as audio and video either live or stored (video on demand). RTSP 1.0 is described in RFC 2326. It defines a way to start media resources on a server and typically uses port 554 to listen for incoming requests.

RFC 2326 fails to specify how the RTSP URL (paragraph 3.2, page 14) should exactly be used to identify data (eg: audio and/or video). The lack of standarisation of the RTSP URL is exactly where the trouble comes in for most people. What interpretation does your RTSP server have of the URL? How do I know which RTSP URL it expects? Well, there is no way to know. The RTSP standard does not describe a way to determine the URL scheme the server expects. So how does one know what URL scheme to use? You cannot.

The only way to know is by reading the documentation from your network camera. Or ask the manufacturer.

What RTSP URL scheme to use for connection to Axis network cameras?

Luckily this is described in the documentation of your Axis camera. You do need to look for it though. The examples below us vlc as application to remotely view your network camera.

Older Axis (eg: 207, 210) network cameras use the following scheme for an H264 stream (replace mpeg4 with mpeg2 to change the video format).

vlc rtsp://myaxiscamera/mpeg4/media.amp --rtsp-http

Newer Axis (eg: Q 1755/Q 1755-E) network cameras use this scheme:

vlc rtsp://myaxiscamera/axis-media/media.amp --rtsp-http

In both examples you need to replace myaxiscamera with the name (or ipaddress) of the network camera, eg: rtsp://10.10.10.1/mpeg4/media.amp or rtsp://10.10.10.1/axis-media/media.amp). The vlc option --rtsp-http is used for traversing home gateways and firewalls.

Thursday and Saturday one of the VLMC developer hugo demonstrated the current state of VideoLAN Media Creator. He got very good feedback from people and they could not wait to give it a try.

Visitors had all Open Source multimedia projects in one stand. It had FFMPEG, mplayer, Open Graphics, XBMC and VideoLAN (VLC, DVBlast, VLMC, etc) projects. The developers from all these project helped each other during visitor peaks and this created a very good atmosphere. I think the different developers of the projects got to know each other better. I am sure this also results in better cooperation and communication during our normal development work.

"Hello Developers,

I was recently looking at some interesting Formula One photography and came upon this picture.

That is a picture of the Mercedes GP telemetry screen in the pit lane. Very clearly, in the bottom left, is a VLC window! It is unmistakable. I assume they are using it for live streaming, but I am not sure.I merely wanted to bring to your attention the fact that your (most excellent) software is being used behind the scenes in the biggest motorsport in the world!"

If you look closely to the left bottom corner, then you will notice the Qt4 interface volume bar off VLC.

Thanks Dan for sharing this with us.

For more information about the VideoLAN Developer Days 2009 see this link: http://www.videolan.org/videolan/events/vdd09.html

On our boot we showed a demo with VLC integrated in a panelpc which was operated using the firefox browser. Another demo showed a DV Camcorder being transcoded and streamed to another PC (with vlc as client of course). A third demo show VLC connected to an Axis 207 Network camera. And a forth demo showed a collection of blender movies with and without filters (puzzle, gradient, etc) being applied.

During the conference days we talked to the FSFE, ffmpeg, CentOS, TI (beagleboard) and Qt people. It were all friendly contacts. The evenings were mostly filled with pizza's, beer and geek talk.

Read more about the event on PC-WELT website.
<!--break-->

As part of his internship at M2X dionoea got VLC to run on Neuros OSDv2.0 hardware. VLC 0.8.6 now can encode and decode using the DSP codecs. There are still some rough edges but it is a start. If you want to see it with your own eyes, then look at this video.

In a joint effort, "Neuros Technology" and "M2X" will, as part of the "TI-Neuros Open Source Bounties" , port VLC to the "next generation of Neuros OSD" solution. The "VLC" porting project was kicked off on May 28, 2008, with developers directly from VLC community. Jean-Paul Saman, one of the VLC maintainers, will be leading this porting effort.

Aiming to get an efficient and powerful multimedia framework on its Davinci Linux based Open Internet Television HD Platform, a highly optimized multimedia platform based on an ARM-DSP dual core system, Neuros has chosen to use VLC among many other alternatives due to its extensive multimedia functionality, openness, and portability.

The role of VLC in Neuros HDPlatform architecture is to be the playback and encoding engine for all multimedia contents. For codecs, VLC uses plugins to carry out its video decoding/encoding on DSP, while all audio operations are done on ARM side. For Audio/Video I/O, VLC interfaces with the system by directly working with its standard Linux A/V system, for example, frame buffer for video output and V4L2 for video capturing. On application side, VLC implements MPRIS specification and exposes a DBUS interface thus to cleanly separate the multimedia core from applications.

This porting will be based on VLC stable version 0.8.6g (in fact, porting starts with 0.8.6-bugfix, a branch that includes some bugfixes for 0.8.6g since it was released), porting will be carried out in phases, from basic multimedia platform bring up, to full playback and full recording support, with complete system integration done in Q3 of 2008.

As 'open' itself states, all VLC source code files, new or modified during the porting, will be submitted to the central source code repository of the VideoLAN team, under the same license GPLV2 as the rest of the VLC source code.

<!--break-->

Hope to see you there.

Jean-Paul Saman.

As you can see it is still under construction, but as time will advance it will gain more information.

A lot has happened in the past years. Apart from my continues work on Open Source Projects, visiting and organising Open Source congresses. I also started a company called M2X in 2004. OK that is almost four years ago now, but it still feels good.

M2X allows me to follow my dream of working with Open Source software during my professional life. Visit the company website for more information about services offered.

Some of you will already know me because of my work for the Open Source community as developer for VLC and organizer of T-DOSE. For those that do not know me yet, follow the links.

Cya,
Jean-Paul Saman.