streaming from IP-cameras

[ibenarobeno]

Hi there,

Can anyone please tell me if it would be possible to stream audio and video from IP-cameras (www.axis.com) using Wowza?

Thank you in advance.

[charlie]

Flash cannot play the native video format which I believe is MPEG-ES. People have tried to use VLC to transcode the stream to H.264. I have not heard of any success. It seems there is a bug with VLC. It cannot handle a source MPEG4 stream for transcode. So from what I know the answer is no.

Charlie

[Florent.T]

You might want to try RTSP/RTP h264-enabled network cameras, like nexvision ones or ani TI DaVinci-powered network cameras. Tons of reference designs are coming, from Axis as well (http://www.axis.com/promotion/new_ge.../products.htm). But keep in mind that surveillance products are optimized for ~11 fps operation, AFAIK there arent' many cameras capable of encoding h264 at 25/30 fps;

As for audio, i believe most network cameras use voice-like codecs with very low bandwith and bitrate, i'm afraid that's the part that'll be a problem with streaming servers.

[JohnBeales]

I'm working on this as well. I was able to stream a few frames at one point, but have not been truly successful.

One of the main problems I'm having is, I believe, the processing power in the Axis cameras. When I am running an MPEG-4 stream from them, the ping time goes up in the 1-2 second range, which leads to all sorts of problems.

Also, because of the processing power required to transcode from MPEG-ES to h.264 or something similar, you are better to try to find a camera that creates h.264 itself. Unfortunately, it's not me who has made the camera decisions, so I am stuck trying to transcode with VLC at the moment.

If I am successful, I will definitely post about it.

[ibenarobeno]

thank you very much. i a looking forward to hearing if anyone has success on that.

[ibenarobeno]

what about streaming Motion jpeg (MJPEG) format?

[charlie]

Flash player only support Sorenson Spark (basically H.263), VP6 or H.264 video. It does not support motion JPEG. Motion JPEG will need to be transcoded to one of these formats.

Charlie

[JohnBeales]

I have found a very hack-ish way to make VLC transcode a stream from an Axis camera. You need two instances of VLC and a named pipe. Here's what worked for me, step-by-step:

Make a named 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}"

The only thing is it takes a whole lot of processing power, and there are a lot of parts, so therefore a lot of potential for things to mess up. Also, I don't really trust VLC to not crash.

It is also sort of possible to use Darwin Streaming Server instead of the first VLC instance, and not use a named pipe, but sometimes VLC dies when doing that.

I have both VLC and Wowza running on the same server. I posted a fuller explanation of how I arrived at this solution on my blog.

I did a lot of testing on a Mac, but I got the final solution running on a webserver running Fedora Core 6.

[vdeprojects]

I was wondering whether there are any (must not be Axis) camera's that can stream (H264 or other if support in the Flash player) directly to the Wowza server so I can view it in the Flash player? So I would not like to use any additional software or hardware encoder.

[enriqueroca]

Hi Everyone

Im from peru and im working in same project of broadcasting video from axis207 camera, like you, I found this link and i found int interesting

http://www.networkcamerareviews.com/...about1549.html

maybe help us for to found a solution