RTSP Streaming

This example allows you to stream frames using MediaMTX, which is a media server and proxy that allows you to publish/subscribe to media streams.

Installation

Install MediaMTX, you can either go with standalone binary release or docker image.

You will also need to install ffmpeg library, as Python script uses it to forward encoded frames to the MediaMTX server.

# On Ubuntu 24.04 it should install 6.1.1:
sudo apt install ffmpeg
# On MacOs, should install 7.0.2:
brew install ffmpeg
# On Windows (within Admin PowerShell), should install 7.0.2:
choco install ffmpeg
# Or download from https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

Ubuntu challenges

On Ubuntu 22.04 we encountered that ffmpeg is available up to only 4.2.2 with the default apt repo, which doesn't recognize the H264 stream correctly. After upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04, we were able to install ffmpeg==6.1.1 and the code works as expected.

Usage

First, run the MediaMTX server:

$ ./mediamtx
2024/08/21 15:26:08 INF MediaMTX v1.8.5
2024/08/21 15:26:08 INF configuration loaded from /Users/erik/Downloads/mediamtx_v1.8.5_darwin_arm64/mediamtx.yml
2024/08/21 15:26:08 INF [RTSP] listener opened on :8554 (TCP), :8000 (UDP/RTP), :8001 (UDP/RTCP)
2024/08/21 15:26:08 INF [RTMP] listener opened on :1935
2024/08/21 15:26:08 INF [HLS] listener opened on :8888
2024/08/21 15:26:08 INF [WebRTC] listener opened on :8889 (HTTP), :8189 (ICE/UDP)
2024/08/21 15:26:08 INF [SRT] listener opened on :8890 (UDP)

Now let's run the main.py script, which will start publishing H264-encoded stream to the MediaMTX server.

python3 main.py

View stream

To see the streamed frames, use a RTSP Client (e.g. VLC Network Stream) with the following link

rtsp://localhost:8554/mystream

On Ubuntu or Mac OS, you can use ffplay (part of the ffmpeg library) to preview the stream, which will provide better performance than VLC (400ms latency vs >1sec latency).

ffplay -fflags nobuffer -fflags discardcorrupt -flags low_delay -framedrop rtsp://localhost:8554/mystream