Convert video Input Stream to RTMP

Question

I want to stream video recording from my android phone to network media server.

The first problem is that when setting MediaRecorder output to socket, the stream is missing some mdat size headers. This can be fixed by preprocessing that stream locally and adding missing data to stream in order to produce valid output stream.

The question is how to proceed from there.

How can I go about output that stream as an RTMP stream?

Solution 1

First, let's unwind your question. As you've surmised, RTMP isn't currently supported by Android. You can use a few side libraries to add support, but these may not be full implementations or have other undesirable side effects and bugs that cause them to fail to meet your needs.

The common alternative in this case is to use RTSP. It provides a comparable session format that has its own RFC, and its packet structure when combined with RTP is very similar (sans some details) to your desired protocol. You could perform the necessary fixups here to transmute RTP/RTSP into RTMP, but as mentioned, such effort is currently outside the development scope of your application.

So, let's assume you would like to use RTMP (invalidating this thread) and that the above-linked library does not meet your needs.

You could, for example, follow this tutorial for recording and playback using Livu, Wowza, and Adobe Flash Player, talking with the Livu developer(s) about licensing their client. Or, you could use this client library and its full Android recorder example to build your client.

To summarize:

RTSP

• This thread, using Darwin Media Server, Windows Media Services, or VLC

RTMP

• This library,
• This thread and this tutorial, using Livu, Wowza, and Adobe Flash Player
• This client library and this example recorder

Best of luck with your application. I admit that I have a less than comprehensive understanding of all of these libraries, but these appear to be the standard solutions in this space at the time of this writing.

Edit:

According to the OP, walking the RTMP library set:

• This library: He couldn't make the library demos work. More importantly, RTMP functionality is incomplete.
• This thread and this tutorial, using Livu, Wowza, and Adobe Flash Player: This has a long tutorial on how to consume video, but its tutorial on publication is potentially terse and insufficient.
• This client library and this example recorder: The given example only covers audio publication. More work is needed to make this complete.

In short: more work is needed. Other answers, and improvements upon these examples, are what's needed here.

Solution 2

If you are using a web-browser on Android device, you can use WebRTC for video capturing and server-side recording, i.e with Web Call Server 4

Thus the full path would be:

Android Chrome [WebRTC] > WCS4 > recording

So you don't need RTMP protocol here.

If you are using a standalone RTMP app, you can use any RTMP server for video recording. As i know Wowza supports H.264+Speex recording.

Comments

[Marko]

AFAIR, RSSP is not an option since it require device to serve video. I would prefer if device could publish video to server.

[MrGomez]

@MarkoKocić From what I understand and what I've read, publication functionality from Android is plausible with this protocol. But, let's ignore that for a moment. Can you expand on why this set of RTMP solutions doesn't work for you? Accepting or refuting them will greatly help me and other answerers better understand your needs.

[MrGomez]

@MarkoKocić Understood. I'll perform more research when I have a chance to see if I can make these better meet your needs. In the future, please spool your response out as a comment or a question update; updating an answer directly with additional content is, excepting community wiki posts, not a desirable edit according to SO's style guidelines. :)

[MrGomez]

@MarkoKocić I'm not especially proud about failing to completely answer this question before the half-bounty fired (to be fair, I was horrifically busy last week). I'm still looking into better solutions, but if someone else nabs this with a succinct and correct answer, I most certainly won't complain!

[NickUnuchek]

can you say something about how to get stream video from rtmp server here is my post

[Andrew]

Try OS Broadcaster for Android (also one for iOS), it is an excellent RTMP video camera streamer.