Recently, I’ve been working on streaming live video from IP cameras to a Flash player on a website. It sounds simple, but not so much, (if you’re in a hurry, skip to the solution).
The problem is that most IP cameras are not made for streaming live, full-motion, events to the web. They’re made for surveillance at 11 FPS in Motion JPEG format, (that’s just a bunch of JPEG images coming one after another). This is obviously not ideal from a bandwidth perspective at all. The cameras that our project uses are Axis 207 and 210 cameras. These cameras are capable of streaming MPEG-4 video, and when you look at the video in a web browser it looks pretty good. When I first saw that, I was excited – I could just stream into a Flash media server, (We’re using Wowza Media Server Pro at the moment), and that would send everything off to the player, right? Wrong.
It turns out that most, if not all, Axis products stream in MPEG4-ES, which flash cannot understand, and therefore our server rejects. I had to find a way to change MP4V-ES to h.264.
The obvious solution to transcoding the video stream from MP4V-ES to h.264 is VLC. While it looks like a media player that can handle a lot of formats, under the surface lies a powerful, command-line based, transcoding and streaming program. I discovered that, in theory, I should be able to issue one command to VLC and have it receive the MPEG4-ES stream from the camera, transcode it to h.264, and stream it to the Wowza, which would handle the rest.
I started by opening a file, transcoding it to h.264, and streaming it to Wowza:
vlc -vvv /path/to/file/Extremists.m4v --sout "#transcode{venc=x264,vcodec=x264,vb=500,scale=1,acodec=mp4a,ab=32,channels=2,samplerate=22100}:rtp{dst=SERVER-IP-ADDRESS,sdp=file:///path/to/wowza/content/myStream.sdp}"
It was a little rough, as the testing server doesn’t have a lot of processing power, but it worked. Awesome. Now I just have to hook it up to the stream from the camera, right?
I added the camera as the source and removed the sound:
vlc -vvv rtsp://camera-ip-address:554/mpeg4/1/media.amp --no-sout-audio --sout "#transcode{venc=x264,vcodec=x264,vb=200,scale=1}:rtp{dst=SERVER-IP-ADDRESS,sdp=file:///absolute/path/to/wowza/content/myStream.sdp}"
With Wowza already running on the server, I typed that in to terminal, and it started to look good. Then PAF! I get this error:
[00000385] access_output_udp private debug: mmh, hole (147841635484807 > 2s) -> drop
VLC seems to think that a frame, or some piece of information has been delayed 147841635484807 seconds. I highly doubt that, but VLC is convinced. Try as I might, I was not able to get VLC to realize that the frame, (or whatever bit of info), was simply missing a timestamp or something.
So, I figured I would debug just the connection to the camera. I opened a VNC session, and ran this:
vlc -vvv rtsp://camera-ip-address:554/mpeg4/1/media.amp
To see if I could view the video. I could, so I tried saving it to a file:
vlc -vvv rtsp://CAMERA-IP-ADDRESS:554/mpeg4/media.amp --no-drop-late-frames --no-sout-audio --sout "#std{mux=ts,access=file,dst=/tmp/camstream.m4v}"
This worked also. It appears that the problem only occurs when I am trying to open, transcode, and send out the stream all at once.
I realized, if I can transcode from a file and stream, and if I can capture a stream and save it to a file, I should be able to do both at the same time. It works! The steps are, make the pipe:
mkpipe /tmp/vpipe
Then capture the stream and save it to the pipe:
vlc -vvv rtsp://CAMERA-IP-ADDRESS:554/mpeg4/media.amp --no-drop-late-frames --no-sout-audio --sout "#std{mux=ts,access=file,dst=/tmp/vpipe}"
And finally read from the pipe, transcode, and stream to the flash server:
vlc -vvv /tmp/vpipe --no-sout-audio --sout "#transcode{venc=x264,vcodec=x264,vb=500,scale=1}:rtp{dst=SERVER-IP-ADDRESS,sdp=file:///path/to/wowza/content/myStream.sdp}"
Shazam!
There are a couple of caveats, though:
- This sucks major processing horsepower. Make sure you’ve got enough
- To make a stream work this way you have to have 2 copies of VLC running, plus your flash server. That’s a lot of parts that could have a problem
Because of these caveats, I am still looking for an alternate solution, and may stream MPEG-4 to browsers until Axis has its h.264 products ready later this year.
Yesterday, I did find a second possible solution. Instead of using the first instance of VLC to capture the stream, it is sometimes possible to use Darwin Streaming Server to capture the stream, then use 1 instance of VLC to transcode it. This seems to use much less processing power, but is not 100% reliable either.
Whew, I am tired just reading your process. We are trying to take a linksys camera and push it through to Mogulus. Mogulus can not take the IP and I was wondering if I could use that IP camera routed through Adobe Flash encoder 2.5.
Here is the link to the camera.
http://XXX.XXX.XXX/img/main.cgi?next_file=main.htm
Here is an example of Mogulus on our site streaming live from Beijing.
http://www.kare11.com/news/olympics/beijing/default.aspx
Jeff Kraker
kare11.com
That could be rough. When we were first exploring our options we played around with Mogulus a bunch, but we couldn’t find a way to stream in from an IP camera, (I actually E-mailed them and they said that they didn’t support it at the time).
From what I’ve seen, and I tried both, it’s not possible to hook Adobe Flash Encoder, or the On2 encoder, up to an IP camera. It would be great if that was possible.
If you can get your camera’s stream to play in Quicktime or something, you might try, (and this is pretty hack-ish), is play the video in Quicktime on a computer, and then capture the screen of that computer and send it to Mogulus. I’m not sure about audio, or quality, but it’ll get a picture there.
Another option would be to transcode the video somehow, then stream it to Mogulus, but I think you have to stream to Mogulus in Adobe’s proprietary RTMP format, and I don’t think VLC can stream out in RTMP, so you’d need something else in the middle, like Wowza that I’m using.
Thanks, we are looking at an I-frame of the live video and moving on to fight again another day.
Jeff
I know this is a little off topic specifically to flash, but I stream live broadcasts beautifully using the Axis camera -> Windows Media Encoder -> WMS publish point. While the output obviously isn’t flash, this configuration is highly supported, easy, well tested. Is there a specific reason your outputs need to be flash video?
The reason we wanted flash was so we could use a custom player with some stats in it and some advertising overlays on the video. We had given some thought to using Darwin Streaming Server for a while and abandoning flash altogether but in the end we bought new cameras.
Hello,
I am trying to capture the steam from an Axis M211 camera and simply save it as a file. The codecs and encapsulation that I have been attempting work for a brief time, then the video starts to break up, then smear and be unviewable.
Any help would be appreciated. If I could just save the stream in a format that could be played back using VLC, it would solve our issue.
Thanks!
Bob
Robert: You may be able to make the camera save the stream as an MP4 and upload it somewhere by FTP. The 207s, 210s, and P3301s that I have worked with all have this ability – would that work for you?
John,
Thanks for the reply. The requirements for the project require that the files are saved in hour long chunks (no motion detect).
I thought that this might be easier accomplished using VLC, as I can get the stream for an hour, exit, then start again.
It may be easier to do with VLC. If you’re having problems with smear see if there’s a setting for keyframe interval – it’ll increase your bandwidth slightly, but it should reduce the smear.
Are you able to view the stream without saving it?
Is there a H264 Ip camera avaible so we can directly read the stream in Flash player without having to transcode ?
and what is the difference between MPEG4-ES and H264 ?
Regards
There are h.264 IP cameras available. I’ve used the Axis P3301, and Axis is coming out with some cheaper ones soon as well, if they haven’t already. You will still want a streaming server of some sort, I’ve tested successfully with Wowza Media Server Pro.
I’m not sure exactly the difference between MPEG4-ES and h.264, but I know that Flash can play h.264, but it can not play MPEG4-ES
Ok… But are there RTMP protocol builtin cameras ?
The purpose is to have view real time stream inside Flash player WITHUT having a PC (server) switched on: Flash is connected directlty to the webcam
Regards
Sorry, there isn’t RTMP built into any camera that I know of – only RTSP, which flash won’t play directly. This means that somewhere there has to be a computer switched on.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be your computer. In fact, it will work better if it’s a webserver somewhere. If you don’t have a webserver you want to use, (and $1k to spend on the media server software), there’s an easier solution: SimpleCDN offers decently-priced pay-as-you-go streaming, and they should be able to handle streaming from a camera with h.264 built in out to a flash player. They’ve been doing a lot of testing recently, and I believe bought some cameras for testing. Their service is probably the cheapest way to get started that I’ve found.
The quality of CDN’s streaming looks pretty good.
I too would like to try and stream images from an IP-cam. I didn’t know Flash was an option, but the problem comes from the h.264 conversion.
I’ve got access to quite a few different cams but all of them are still on the MPEG-4 technology. I was hoping that MJPEG would solve some of these issues (and works with Safari as well) but I guess not.
Good info anyway and I’ll try and keep in touch with what you guys are talking about. cheers!
Yeah, live transcoding is very tricky – and processor intensive if you don’t have a hardware-based transcoder.
You could stream as a non-h.264 MPEG-4 stream, people would still be able to watch the stream using Quicktime or maybe Windows Media Player. MJPEG sounds good, except it uses a massive amount of bandwidth compared to true video formats.
We’re working with similar (vlc 0.8.6d and wowza 1.5.3) scenario and we experimented the same situation, only in some cases. With your soloution (fifo) the problem continues appearing. Only if we save to a file the stream and transcoding after this file with VLC the issue doesn’t appear, but it’s unviable.
We tested new 0.9.6 version of VLC and it seems to work greatfully, but with one of our input (hw encoder accessed via rtsp), this version of VLC lost the connection after 30 seconds.
Can you describe with detail how to set Darwin between the rtsp source and the VLC transcoding instance? It will solve the ‘drop’ issue with old version of VLC, and this new issue with the new version.
Regards
If you only need to use Darwin for one stream it’s pretty easy to set up. It’s been a while since I did it, but I think if you only need to run a single stream through DSS it’s pretty easy. Check out this blog post about it.
[…] John Beales: Using VLC to transcode an Axis Camera’s video stream, and stream it out again Recently, I’ve been working on streaming live video from IP cameras to a Flash player on a website. It sounds simple, but not so much, (if you’re in a hurry, skip to the solution). (tags: vlc camera transcode streaming) […]
[…] public links >> h264 Using VLC to transcode an Axis Camera’s video stream, and stream … First saved by gregp01 | 20 days ago [BSS] Natsume Yuujinchou – 08 (H.264) First saved by […]
Has anyone seen a way to serve a flash player directly from a h.264 camera? I think this would be the best solution so you can run just the IP camera and not a server.
Ideally serving the h.264 streams directly from the camera would require some sort of RTMP server on the camera. RTMP over HTTP would be ideal.
I have a H.264 camera running linux that I’m trying to hack this on.
You’re right – the camera would have to have a built-in RTMP server. I’m not aware of any camera that has one at the moment, but I don’t know all of the cameras on the market. The problem with working this way is that many cameras don’t have a high-bandwidth connection to the internet, but in situations where they do it may work well. If you’re able to get it working let me know for sure!
I was thinking about the RTMP support so you can use a flash viewer, not necessarily for high bandwidth. Alternatives are to use Active-x (IE only) or require quicktime. I think flash is more universal. I agree that for large scale viewing a fat server would be needed, but for one or two viewers something small scale would be all that is needed.
I’m going to look into it to see if I can hack something up, I haven’t quite grasped all the encapsulation of H.264 inside RTMP yet, and ultimately I’d like to use RTMPT as running multiple ports on a device make it hard to share via port forwarding or advanced technologies like Yoics in a flexible manner.
Hi John.
Now that AXIS are selling h264 cameras, has all of this topic been resolved – ie an AXIS camera can generate the right type of stream for Flash Media Server to handle without any modification?
Thanks for your article.
Paul C.
An h.264 capable camera from Axis can generate a stream that Wowza Media Server can handle without any modification, and I would assume that the same goes for FMS, I just haven’t tried it.
At this point, if buying cameras for web streaming, I recommend buying an h.264-capable camera. The cost involved in transcoding will cost more than the price difference in the cameras.
If there’s a large inventory of older cameras, especially if the replacement cost is high, this may still apply, but it is probably in the buyer’s best interest to try to find an economical hardware-based transcoder. It will most likely have a lower total cost of ownership and have fewer problems.
I just follwed what you did upto the part where you got the error about “147841635484807 seconds”, but didn’t get an error and every thing worked perfectly.
I am running a Axis 241S video server, this video server doesn’t have any support for h.264, but thanks to your info it’s working through Wowza.
That’s excellent news. Maybe the Axis 241S makes a better stream than the old 207/210 cameras. What version of VLC are you using?
I have logitech quickcam notebook pro camera and i use vlc-1.0.0-rc3 in windows XP. I can stream and transcode it using H.264. But I can do it using Dirac codec. How do you think about it??!!Thank for ur suggestion 🙂
I am not familiar with the Dirac codec, I’ll look into it, thanks.
Most of the problems seem to stem from the fact that the camera is remote, and we have to use an RTSP stream as input, but if a codec change can help things, and if that codec is still flash-compatible, that would be great news.
John,
What did you do to get the axis stream to be captured by the Darwin Streaming Server? Will Darwin stream it directly and if so will it support multiple cameras?
Any help is appreciated,
Thanks,
Robert.
It’s been a while, but I think that I copied the .sdp file from the camera, edited a couple of lines, and gave that to Darwin. Check out this thread in the Wowza forums, and the web page that is linked in the thread. They deal with getting Darwin to stream from some Axis cameras.
Hello John,
I use a different approach on feeding Wowza with the camera stream. With FFMPEG, you can feed Wowza just like with VLC, but it’s a lot less CPU intensive, you have a lot more control and reliability, and you just need to use one command line.
This is the current command line I use for this:
ffmpeg -er 4 -r 15 -s 352×240 -f mjpeg -an -i ‘http://192.168.xx.xx/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?resolution=352×240&compression=50&fps=15’ -vcodec libx264 -vpre fastfirstpass -vpre baseline -b 24k -bt 32k -threads 0 -f rtp ‘rtp://192.168.xx.xx:5000/’
Even though, it still needs a lot of testing, it works way better than VLC in our preliminary testing phases.
Kudos from Mexico,
José Antonio
That sounds great. When I did this I tried with ffmpeg, but wasn’t able to get it working, however, it seems like you’re able to, which is awesome.
Hopefully this will mean that more people can transcode affordably instead of having to upgrade their cameras.
I wonder if the ffmpeg solution posted above also works for mpeg 4 streams. It seems that the only way the cameras will send mpeg4 is through rtsp and ffmpegs rtsp implementation has some problems.
Anyone got ffmpeg live transcoding to work with mpeg4 and not just mjpeg?
Özgür
You should also check out this solution. Is basically running crtmpserver on the camera itself. No 3rd party software needed 🙂
http://groups.google.com/group/c-rtmp-server/browse_thread/thread/f5de18f4e8b5ea5f
Interesting – I’m not 100% clear, would I have to buy a special camera to make this work, or is it software that I can install on an existing camera?
You can compile it for axis camera. But if you don’t want to do that, you can also pull the RTSP stream from the camera with crtmpserver. And serve it via RTMP or even publish that stream further to another RTMP server
Cheers,
Andrei
Cool, that sounds like another good option – and much cheaper than some of the commercial options out there 😉
[…] Kamera mit VLC widergeben Eigentlich ja: https://johnbeales.com/20080820/using…-it-out-again/ Welche Axis hast du denn genau? VLC einfach mit folgende Optionen starten: […]
Hey John, I’ve gots a [LONG] question for you:
I’m remotely logging onto a linux machine and starting up vlc through the terminal cmd line [typed “vlc”] and on the [windows machine] desktop starting the local vlc. I have an axis 207mw cam. I can stream live video from the cam from the linux machine through vlc & viewing it on the local vlc. Now on the remote vlc, I use: http://192.168.1.233/axis-cgi/mjpg/v…esolution=2CIF – network protocol window under Media –> Streaming –> Network tab. This cmd [http://192.168.1.233/axis-cgi/mjpg/v…solution=2CIF] now becomes the source w/http as the type. The destination is UDP & to be Displayed locally w/transcoding enabled w/the profile: Video – MPEG-2 + MPGA (TS). All output is now to be a transcoded stream delivered via UDP to the machine address 192.168.1.241 [the local windows machine that vlc will be running] & the port 1234. So after I click “Stream,” I’m prompted for the User name & Password & once I input that, the cam starts to stream live. On the other vlc [on the desktop], I click Media–>Open Network Stream–> and enter the Network Protocol : udp://@:1234, & click “play.” Now the video is being streamed from 1 machine to another, but I want to make it so that I don’t need to bring up vlc on the remote machine, but instead use the vlc-generated stream output string [under the “options” button “Generated stream output string” ] :sout=#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=800,scale=1,acodec =mpga,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:duplicat e{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=192.168.1.241:1234 },dst=display} & like type that into a vi text editor & executing the file instead, so the only thing I’d see the the vlc live stream on the desktop. Is such a thing possible? Cause I know you can’t save settings on vlc either…what to do?
Thanks a bunch in advance
I’m not 100% clear on what you want to do. Do you want to run a script on the local, (Windows), machine that will do everything for you, or are you looking to just be able to run a script on the remote, (Linux), machine that will start VLC and your transcoded stream without you having to log in remotely to the linux machine and mess around in the VLC GUI?
If it’s the latter, you would need to figure out how to start, and maybe control, VLC from the command-line to get the stream up & running. For the username & password on the camera’s stream you might be able to use the http://username:password@192.168.1.233/axis-cgi/mjpg/v…esolution=2CIF URL syntax to enter them, so that might take care of the password prompt for you, (test that – I don’t know for sure). You *should* be able to give VLC a similar command-line to what you posted and get it to work. You’ll have to tell it what stream to open, (it might be sin= …. or something, I can’t remember). I think you’re on the right track, you’ll have to play around more with VLC – it’s been a couple of years since I was playing around with VLC to try to make this work and I know that VLC has changed a lot in that time.
If you’re looking to not have to log in to the Linux machine at all and be able to start everything from your Windows machine, I would suggest writing a batch file or something that will somehow start a shell script on the linux machine – maybe by doing an SSH login then starting it or something, or, if you’re scripting your Windows machine to log in to the Linux machine anyway you could just put all of the commands in the batch file and have the Windows machine “type” them for you via the SSH connection.
Finally, this seems to be working for you over a LAN, but check to make sure that UDP streaming protocols will work over the Internet if that’s your goal. I know that multicast doesn’t work over the internet, but basic UDP streaming should.
Hey John,
Thanks a bunch for your reply & sorry for any confusion. Ok, so this is the line I currently have in a text editor [vlccommand] saved ont he linux box:
vlc -vvv http://root:password@192.168.1.233/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=1&resolution=2CIF –sout ‘#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=800,scale=1,acodec=mpga,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=mp4,dst=192.168. 1.241:1234},dst=display}’
So when I execute that line in the prompt, it begins processing & brings up the VLC interface & starts displaying the live stream on the linux box, but does NOT do anything on the windows side. I’m expecting it to start displaying the live stream on the VLC on windows, but that’s not happening…do I have to configure something on windows, like the batch file or something??
Once you have run the command above and the stream is displaying on the linux side, if you start VLC manually on the windows side can you see the stream? You might have to tell it to open the URL of the Linux machine.
No I can’t…that’s the problem…when I execute that command [either copy/paste it into the prompt line or just copy/paste the file that contains that command, which I’ve named vlccommand] it brings up a vlc interface on the linux box & then I manually bring up VLC on the windows box, but nothing streams over. My intention is not to have VLC come up automatically on windows, it’s ok that I bring it up manually, but the thing is, it doesn’t catch the stream coming from the linux box. Now you mentioned the URL of the linux box, would that be like udp://@:1234 or udp://@192.168.1.41:1234??
I agreatly appreciate all your help and input John & look forward to your reply.
I think the URL of the stream on the linux box would be udp://@192.168.1.41:1234 – although I’m not sure about the @ sign in the URL. Probably, on the windows box, when you open the stream, you’ll want to enter that URL in the Stream URL box, (Is that what you did before when you manually started the stream on the Linux box? It should be the same).
Also, you may want to check on this portion of the vlc command you’re using on the Linux box: “dst=192.168. 1.241:1234” It may restrict who can view your stream, and if the IP isn’t right, (is your router using static IPs for each computer?), you may just not be allowed to see the stream.
Hey John,
For the linux part, the only protocol & address it asks for is what I’m using: http://192.168.1.233/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=1&resolution=2CIF, which is the IP of the camera. It doesn’t ask for the IP of the source [192.168.1.41]. So the entire cmd I’m using on the linux part is: http://root:password@192.168.1.233/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?camera=1&resolution=2CIF
On the windows box, I manually enter just the protocol & port number [udp://@:1234]. I tried also entering udp://@192.168.1.41:1234 — the IP addy of the linux box & port number, but that doesn’t work either. I’ve tried omitting the “@” or just try udp://@:192.168.1.41 & still no luck. Now if I was to bring up vlc manually on windows & input udp://@192.168.1.41:1234 or udp://@:1234, and manually bring up vlc on linux & manually input all the options 1 by 1, then it all works fine & streams from 1 pc to another & displays the video nicely. It’s only when I try to automate it, it doesn’t work….
Being that it’s working on the linux side, I have a feeling my problem is on the windows side & it might just be a config problem…or maybe not…I don’t know.
Now I also tried omitting the “dst=192.168.1.241:1234? portion of the cmd altogether; tried “dst=192.168.1.241? & “dst=1234? & it was still streaming fine with all those changes on the linux part when I executed vlccommad, but still nothing on the windows side.
Any thoughts? I’m getting frustrated here :o(
Since it works when you do everything manually, but doesn’t work when you automate Linux but do things manually on Windows, (that’s correct – right?), I think the problem is with vlccommand.
What if you write down everything that you do when you manually start VLC & open the stream on the Linux box, then make sure that there’s a corresponding command in vlccommand for each step?
If you haven’t already, I think that you should test to make sure the VLC instance on the Linux box is receiving the stream when you launch it from the command-line. You can probably do that by replacing the whole duplicate section of the command with dst=display
If that works, (I think you should see the video playing on the linux desktop – I’m assuming you’re using a full desktop here, not just the command-line), then the next thing to look at would be getting the stream to your windows machine. You might want to think about using rtp instead of udp. I’ve never done much udp streaming, I’ve always used rtp/rtsp to do it, with pretty good success.
Could the prob. be w/vlccommand? I just did a copy/paste of the command vlc generates w/no changes. When I copy the line from vlccommand as-is& paste it into the prompt line on the linux box, it automatically brings up the VLC window & starts streaming [on linux, not windows]. The only time it works on both is when I manually bring up vlc on linux & manually input the options.
Man there has to be something I’m overlooking here…
Oh & in terms of a pc desktop for the linux, I’m actually using freeXter to bring up a terminal in which I remotely log onto the linux machine. I’m physically on the windows desktop. Would that be a problem?
I have some code that I will eventually be tying onto vlc & that streams in any protocol, but is hard-coded to stream out udp [for efficiency purposes], but for testing purposes, I can test w/rtp, which I have, but not in detail, but I will do that next.
Most likely I will not get a chance to test these options until early next wk. I will get back to you then 🙂
Hi
I have problem in re-streaming live video from Ip camera
we are using Wowzamediaserver 2
i just created camera.stream in contents file in server and mentioned the URL of th ipcamera address inside the file
i started streammanager also it is start sending the streams
but it is not playing on giving rtsp://ip-address/live/camera.stream
whereas camera url is playing in vlc
any help would be appreciate
Open port 554 in wowza/conf/vshost.xml
and try to restart wowza after adding file camera.stream
I was wondering how you configured Wowza? Are you transcoding to the file myStream.sdp, then streaming that file using Wowza?
I have gotten Wowza to re-stream the rtsp feed from my Axis camera, but I am struggling with how to get the transcode to Wowza, where I would subsequently like to embed the Wowza stream in a web page.
Thank you for the information.
Hello guys, we at http://www.click2stream.com build our solution with wowza and some custom java plugins, so know we offer restreaming your ip camera h.264 video via our CDN.
We done something similar for mjpeg ip security cameras but it’s our own software.
Solution with VLC isn’t longtime stable solution ;(
Hello All,
I’m trying to find a free solution to restream an axis IP camera that has h264 support. I want to make the stream available to a browser so the final stream needs to be accessible through http
I already tried vlc but there is a very big lag between the live stream and the restreamed flow.
I tried with latest Wowza, it does the job but it’s not free.
I tried with Windows media services but it doesn’t have rtsp support and is not an option using windows media encoder because then I can’t benefit of h264.
If you have an alternative please let me know.
Any thoughts are more than welcomed.
Hi Alex, we at http://www.click2stream.com offer free plan that fits your needs.
@alex: I haven’t tried Peter’s solution at click2stream.com, but if it’s built on Wowza with some extra plugins it should work well if they’ve done it right.
Wowza is available on Amazon’s EC2 cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis, and they have subscription licenses, so you don’t have to pay a big license fee up front.
At the moment there don’t seem to be any open-source streaming servers, at least not that I know of.