RTSP in Flex

Question

We are currently working on a Flex application that needs to connect to a set a traffic detection cameras via RTSP. Being totally new to the world of video streaming in general, I was wondering if that is possible.

AFAIK it is not possible to consume an RTSP feed in the Flash player, so I'm thinking that we would need some sort of a converter on the server that takes the RTSP stream and converts it to RTMP so we can consume the feed in our Flex app. We were hoping that Red5 could helps us do that.

Am I correct in my assumption and has anyone done this?

Answer 1

You could try restreaming it via Red5 and connecting your Flex app to the Red5 server.

Read more at: http://red5wiki.com/wiki/SteamStream

Answer 2

Wowza Media seems to support RTSP to RTMF converting: http://www.wowzamedia.com/comparison.html

And there is also general video stream transcoder Xuggle http://www.xuggle.com/ based on Red5 and FFMPEG.

Answer 3

Red5 is fine, especially now with xuggle support (allows for off the shelf integration of FFMPEG) which provides great integration with red5 (ie. great tutorial on doing live stream conversion etc).

Answer 4

If you're familiar with programming in flex or whatever it takes to bring it into a swf, then you could try and implement rtsp-over-tcp, AFAIK udp isn't available in flash.

Answer 5

Christophe, did you achieved this functionality? I'm trying to do the same thing

Answer 6

You can use http://erlyvideo.org/ RTMP server to restream RTSP video to flash clients. I've used it to broadcast video from Quicktime Broadcaster

Answer 7

I just tested this with Wowza. Input was RTSP stream from Etrovision H264 DVS. Take a look at this tread and use Application.xml file from there if you want to try it: http://96.30.11.104/forums/showthread.php?p=24806

Video is playing in Flash player, but the price is 5 seconds delay for a single stream, all equipment in office LAN, server running at Core2Duo/2.8GHz/3GB RAM. Not sure if it can go faster or it's the expected transcoding damage for this setup...

Answer 8

While its public / open source version is a bit dated now, you can have a look at this project which did RTSP and Image based camera transcoding into RTMP streams with Xuggler and Red5. http://sourceforge.net/projects/imux/
(disclaimer: I worked for the company that created the original source)