Streaming via RTSP or RTP in HTML5

Question

Technically 'Yes'

(but not really...)

HTML 5's <video> tag is protocol agnostic—it does not care. You place the protocol in the src attribute as part of the URL. E.g.:

<video src="rtp://myserver.com/path/to/stream">
    Your browser does not support the VIDEO tag and/or RTP streams.
</video>

or maybe

<video src="http://myserver.com:1935/path/to/stream/myPlaylist.m3u8">
    Your browser does not support the VIDEO tag and/or RTP streams.
</video>

That said, the implementation of the <video> tag is browser specific. Since it is early days for HTML 5, I expect frequently changing support (or lack of support).

From the W3C's HTML5 spec (The video element):

User agents may support any video and audio codecs and container formats

The spirit of the question, I think, was not truly answered. No, you cannot use a video tag to play rtsp streams as of now. The other answer regarding the link to Chromium guy's "never" is a bit misleading as the linked thread / answer is not directly referring to Chrome playing rtsp via the video tag. Read the entire linked thread, especially the comments at the very bottom and links to other threads.

The real answer is this: No, you cannot just put a video tag on an html 5 page and play rtsp. You need to use a Javascript library of some sort (unless you want to get into playing things with flash and silverlight players) to play streaming video. {IMHO} At the rate the html 5 video discussion and implementation is going, the various vendors of proprietary video standards are not interested in helping this move forward so don't count of the promised ease of use of the video tag unless the browser makers take it upon themselves to somehow solve the problem...again, not likely.{/IMHO}

This is an old qustion, but I had to do it myself recently and I achieved something working so (besides response like mine would save me some time): Basically use ffmpeg to change the container to HLS, most of the IPCams stream h264 and some basic type of PCM, so use something like that:

ffmpeg -v info -i rtsp://ip:port/h264.sdp -c:v copy -c:a copy -bufsize 1835k -pix_fmt yuv420p -flags -global_header -hls_time 10 -hls_list_size 6 -hls_wrap 10 -start_number 1 /var/www/html/test.m3u8

Then use video.js with HLS plugin This will play Live stream nicely There is also a jsfiddle example under second link).

Note: although this is not a native support it doesn't require anything extra on user frontend.

There are three streaming protocols / technology in HTML5:

Live streaming, low latency - WebRTC - Websocket

VOD and Live streaming, high latency - HLS

1. WebRTC

In fact WebRTC is SRTP(secure RTP protocol). Thus we can say that video tag supports RTP(SRTP) indirectly via WebRTC.

Therefore to get RTP stream on your Chrome, Firefox or another HTML5 browser, you need a WebRTC server which will deliver the SRTP stream to browser.

2. Websocket

It is TCP based, but with lower latency than HLS. Again you need a Websocket server.

3. HLS

Most popular high-latency streaming protocol for VOD(pre-recorded video).

Chrome will never implement support RTSP streaming.

At least, in the words of a Chromium developer here:

we're never going to add support for this

With VLC i'm able to transcode a live RTSP stream (mpeg4) to an HTTP stream in a OGG format (Vorbis/Theora). The quality is poor but the video work in Chrome 9. I have also tested with a trancoding in WEBM (VP8) but it's don't seem to work (VLC have the option but i don't know if it's really implemented for now..)

The first to have a doc on this should notify us ;)