How to display RTSP from IP Camera/CCTV in iOS

Question

There is obviously a way to do this because so many applications are already doing it - NetCamViewer and iCamviewer to name just one.

I have searched and searched, but I'm not finding anything of value that gives a hint as to how this is done. I'm reaching out hoping that someone will give me a clue.

I'm trying to connect to an video security camera (Y-CAM), which supports the RTSP protocol, and display the video from my iPhone/iPad application. The camera has an IP address and I can view the video from a web browser and from Quicktime running on my Mac. The problem is that RSTP is not supported on iOS so even trying to connect using Safari on an iPad doesn't work.

I've read that some are trying to use Live5555, but I haven't seen an article that describes if it has been done successfully and how.

An alternative is to capture the RTSP stream on a server, convert it to an HTTP Live stream and then connect to the HTTP Live stream from iOS. Unfortunately, this hasn't proved as easy as it sounds.

I'd prefer to go directly to the camera like other applications I've seen do. the RTSP to Live is a fall back if I have to.

Any hints are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

This is wrong :) or not necessary (An alternative is to capture the RTSP stream on a server, convert it to an HTTP Live stream and then connect to the HTTP Live stream from iOS. Unfortunately, this hasn't proved as easy as it sounds.)

You should use ffmpeg library, as this library can connect any streaming server (supporting rtsp, mms, tcp, udp ,rtmp ...) and then draw pictures to the screen.. (for drawing you can use opengles or uiimage also works)

First of all, use avformat_open_input to connect to your ip address then use avcodec_find_decoder & avcodec_open2 to find codecs and to open them (you should call them for both audio & video)

Then, in a while loop read packets from server by using av_read_frame method When you get frame, if it is audio then sent it to AudioUnit or AudioQueue, if it is video, then convert it from yuv to rgb format by using sws_scale method and draw the picture to the screen.

That's all.

look at this wrapper also (http://www.videostreamsdk.com), it's written on ffmpeg library and supports iOS