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.
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
I don’t know of any night vision cameras that work out of the box with Wowza Pro. If the camera supports H.264 it should work but that is not a guarentee. I would be sure you can return the camera before making a purchase.
I keep meaning to add authentication to the RTSP restreaming. I will put it higher up on the priority list. Keep checking the patches.
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
It works great with this camera:
http://www.axis.com/products/cam_p3301/index.htm
It supports native H.264 over RTSP/RTP playback. It works out of the box with Wowza Pro with no need for transcoding. I have seen it in action. It works great!
Charlie
I am not sure I have seen anyone have success restreaming from non-H.264 camera using VLC. So I think at this point it is best to choose a camera that supports H.264 directly.
Charlie
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.
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_generation/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.
thank you very much. i a looking forward to hearing if anyone has success on that.
what about streaming Motion jpeg (MJPEG) format?
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.
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.
Hello
I’ve managed to do the trick wich described JohnBeales. It is working not very bad (big delays), but it is not solution for me:( I am trying to capture stream from IP (with VLC) cameras and send it directly to Wowza, unfortunately with out any succes.
Anyone managed to do this with out saving file?
regards
Lukasz
Thank you, but is this only solution? There is really no way to get it working (with out saving image from camera to file) with cameras which doesn’t support h264?
Lukasz
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/forums/about1549.html
maybe help us for to found a solution
May be this is too late, but here is the thread which explains how to convert mpeg4 stream into h.264 stream using VLC and send it to Wowza. I was able to run such a solution for a simple DLink IP-camera so feel free to ask if you have questions.
https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-use-vlc-as-a-live-stream-encoder-with-wowza-media-server-mpeg-ts
It works great with this camera:
http://www.axis.com/products/cam_p3301/index.htm
It supports native H.264 over RTSP/RTP playback. It works out of the box with Wowza Pro with no need for transcoding. I have seen it in action. It works great!
Charlie
Thanks for the tip, Charlie. After reading your post we bought an AXIS P3301 camera, and except for having to allow public/anonymous access to the H.264-stream, everything really worked straight out of the box.
The camera was bought, and is currently used, for testing purposes only - so the anonymous access is not a problem; but if there is a way to have Wowza authenticate itself to the camera, I’d appreciate it if anyone can point me in the right direction.
But more importantly, a customer of ours requires a network camera with infrared / night vision mode.
Have any of you tested out Wowza Media Server Pro with a network camera that supports this, or would it be safe to choose anything as long as the camera has H.264-support?
An example of what our customer requires is http://www.axis.com/products/cam_221/ - but this camera lacks H.264 support.
«The AXIS 221 features an automatic, removable infrared-cut filter, which enables the camera to provide color video when there is sufficient light, and black/white video in dark conditions.»
As these cameras tend to be rather costly, it’d be nice to know if anyone has experience with Wowza + night vision-mode H.264-cameras before buying one - even if it might be a long shot.
I don’t know of any night vision cameras that work out of the box with Wowza Pro.
No worries - it was worth a shot! We’ll look around a bit and check out our options. If I remember, I’ll post our results here.
I keep meaning to add authentication to the RTSP restreaming. I will put it higher up on the priority list. Keep checking the patches.
Excellent! Thanks for the prompt response, and for taking our feedback into consideration.
I have written scripts for OSX which allow IP Camera to FMS, Wowza, Red5 or any other Flash Media compatible server : by presenting the IP Camera to Flash as a standard Webcam.
Works with Skype, MSN or any other webcam apps also.
Please read the full article i have posted here;