Stream a Video Over RTSP Using Live555MediaServer

According to Wikipedia,

LIVE555 Streaming Media is a set of open source (LGPL) C++ libraries developed
by Live Networks, Inc. for multimedia streaming. The libraries support open
standards such as RTP/RTCP and RTSP for streaming, and can also manage video
RTP payload formats such as H.264, H.265, MPEG, VP8, and DV, and audio RTP
payload formats such as MPEG, AAC, AMR, AC-3 and Vorbis. It is used
internally by well-known software such as VLC and mplayer.

The software distribution also includes a complete RTSP server application,
RTSP clients and a RTSP proxy server.

Live555 is the go to project for many developers when it comes to anything related to RTSP, be it a client or a server. It is written in C++, nice, clean and super stable code and on top of that you can extend it very easily. Apart from that, it comes with few of the tools that includes:

HLSProxy: It converts a live RTSP stream (e.g., from a network camera) into a set of HLS (“HTTP Live Streaming”) segments that can be viewed in a HLS-compliant browser
MediaServer: It is a complete RTSP server application. It can stream several kinds of media file.
ProxyServer: It is a unicast RTSP server - built from the “LIVE555 Streaming Media” software - that acts as a ‘proxy’ for one or more ‘back-end’ unicast or multicast RTSP/RTP streams

In this post I will be talking about, building live555 and using Live555 Media Server for streaming local video files over RTSP.

To build Live555:

Download and extract the source code.

curl -o live555-latest.tar.gz http://www.live555.com/liveMedia/public/live555-latest.tar.gz
tar -xvf live555-latest.tar.gz

Generate Makefile. Live555 does not use tools like automake or cmake it has it’s own scripts to generate build files.
```
cd live
./genMakefiles <os-platform>
```
In this case the script genMakefiles is a shell script, that concatenates multiple parts of a Makefile. Here the first argument to this script <os-platform> is actually the os for which you want to build live555. (I know this is obivous :P). If in case you are not sure what should be the argument in your case. Check for the file starting with config. for your operating system in the same directory. You will see config.freebsd, config.linux, config.macosx-catalina etc. Find the one for your os and use that string as the first argument. for example,
```
./genMakefiles linux
```
Once this is done, you will find the Makefile created in the same directory. The next step is simple, just build the application.
To build and install live555 run:
```
make -j3
sudo make install
```

Once this is done, you will find the binaries

hlsProxy/live555HLSProxy
mediaServer/live555ProxyServer
proxyServer/live555MediaServer

To stream the video files over RTSP, we have to use live555MediaServer.

live555MediaServer supports following formats

.264 => a H.264 Video Elementary Stream file
.265 => a H.265 Video Elementary Stream file
.aac => an AAC Audio (ADTS format) file
.ac3 => an AC-3 Audio file
.amr => an AMR Audio file
.dv"=> a DV Video file
.m4e => a MPEG-4 Video Elementary Stream file
.mkv => a Matroska audio+video+(optional)subtitles file
.mp3 => a MPEG-1 or 2 Audio file
.mpg => a MPEG-1 or 2 Program Stream (audio+video) file
.ogg or .ogv or .opus => an Ogg audio and/or video file
.ts"=> a MPEG Transport Stream file (a .tsx index file - if present - provides server ‘trick play’ support)
.vob => a VOB (MPEG-2 video with AC-3 audio) file
.wav => a WAV Audio file
.webm => a WebM audio(Vorbis)+video(VP8) file

Unfortunately this tool does not stream an .mp4 file. If you want to stream a video which is an mp4 file, you can convert it very easily from to .mkv or .webm using ffmpeg, the command is as follows.

ffmpeg -i <input-mp4-file-name>.mp4 -o <output-mkv-file-name>.mkv

ffmpeg -i <input-mp4-file-name>.mp4 -o <output-webm-file-name>.webm

Once you have converted the video file to the appropriate format that live555 can stream, you are good to go.

just go to the directory containing your video file and run

./live555MediaServer

To access this stream using your RTSP client in my case I use the VLC, link will be as follows (you will find these details in the live555MediaServer’s output also.)

rtsp://<your-ip>:8554/<filename>

for example your ip is 192.168.1.4 and the filename is video_file.mkv then your rtsp link will be

rtsp://192.168.1.4:8554/video_file.mkv

So; in conclusion, Live555MediaServer is a great tool if you want to stream your video files over RTSP.

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