How can I display an RTSP video stream in a web page?

Question

I have an ip camera which provides a live RTSP video stream. I can use VLC media player to view the feed by providing it with the URL:

rtsp://cameraipaddress 

But I need to display the feed on a web page. The camera provider supplied an ActiveX control which I got working, but it is really buggy and causes the browser to frequently hang.

Does anyone know of any alternative video plugins I could use which support RTSP?

The camera can be configured to stream in either H264 or MPEG4.

Answer 1

VLC also comes with an ActiveX plugin that can display the feed in a web page:

http://wiki.videolan.org/ActiveX/HTML

<OBJECT classid="clsid:9BE31822-FDAD-461B-AD51-BE1D1C159921"      codebase="http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/latest/win32/axvlc.cab"      width="640" height="480" id="vlc" events="True">    <param name="Src" value="rtsp://cameraipaddress" />    <param name="ShowDisplay" value="True" />    <param name="AutoLoop" value="False" />    <param name="AutoPlay" value="True" />    <embed id="vlcEmb"  type="application/x-google-vlc-plugin" version="VideoLAN.VLCPlugin.2" autoplay="yes" loop="no" width="640" height="480"      target="rtsp://cameraipaddress" ></embed> </OBJECT> 

Answer 2

Roughly you can have 3 choices to display RTSP video stream in a web page:

1. Realplayer
2. Quicktime player
3. VLC player

You can find the code to embed the activeX via google search.

As far as I know, there are some limitations for each player.

1. Realplayer does not support H.264 video natively, you must install a quicktime plugin for Realplayer to achieve H.264 decoding.
2. Quicktime player does not support RTP/AVP/TCP transport, and it's RTP/AVP (UDP) transport does not include NAT hole punching. Thus the only feasible transport is HTTP tunneling in WAN deployment.
3. VLC neither supports NAT hole punching for RTP/AVP transport, but RTP/AVP/TCP transport is available.