Stream from MP4 file over RTSP with ffserver

Question

I'm trying to stream a mp4 file over RTSP using ffserver with no luck so far. I just want to stream directly from the file, without feeding from ffmpeg (no transcoding involved). But I've made it work with mpg video.

Here is my ffserver config file:

Port 8090
BindAddress 0.0.0.0
MaxHTTPConnections 2000
MaxClients 1000
MaxBandwidth 500000
CustomLog -
NoDaemon

RTSPPort 7654
RTSPBindAddress 0.0.0.0

<Stream test1-rtsp>
    Format rtp
    File "/home/g/video_streaming/sample3-mpeg2.mpg"
</Stream>
<Stream test2-rtsp>
    Format rtp
    File "/home/g/video.mp4"
</Stream>

When I launch ffserver, everything seems fine based on the log output:

$ ./dev/ffmpeg/ffserver -f ffserver-sample.conf
ffserver version N-45673-gd0c27e8 Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Oct 18 2012 10:36:52 with gcc 4.6 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5)
  configuration:
  libavutil      51. 76.100 / 51. 76.100
  libavcodec     54. 66.100 / 54. 66.100
  libavformat    54. 33.100 / 54. 33.100
  libavdevice    54.  3.100 / 54.  3.100
  libavfilter     3. 19.103 /  3. 19.103
  libswscale      2.  1.101 /  2.  1.101
  libswresample   0. 16.100 /  0. 16.100
Thu Oct 18 11:54:22 2012 Opening file '/home/g/video.mp4'
Thu Oct 18 11:54:22 2012 Opening file '/home/g/video.mp4'
Thu Oct 18 11:54:23 2012 Opening file '/home/g/video_streaming/sample3-mpeg2.mpg'
Thu Oct 18 11:54:23 2012 [mpeg @ 0x1dae3c0]max_analyze_duration 5000000 reached at 5005000
Thu Oct 18 11:54:23 2012 Opening file '/home/g/video_streaming/sample3-mpeg2.mpg'
Thu Oct 18 11:54:23 2012 [mpeg @ 0x1dae3c0]max_analyze_duration 5000000 reached at 5005000
Thu Oct 18 11:54:23 2012 FFserver started.

Finally, if I run ffplay in order to test the server, everything works fine for the mpg file, but not for the mp4:

$ ffplay rtsp://192.168.1.99:7654/test2-rtsp
ffplay version N-45656-g916352f Copyright (c) 2003-2012 the FFmpeg developers
  built on Oct 17 2012 16:14:14 with gcc 4.4.5 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.4.4-14ubuntu5.1)
  configuration:
  libavutil      51. 76.100 / 51. 76.100
  libavcodec     54. 66.100 / 54. 66.100
  libavformat    54. 33.100 / 54. 33.100
  libavdevice    54.  3.100 / 54.  3.100
  libavfilter     3. 19.103 /  3. 19.103
  libswscale      2.  1.101 /  2.  1.101
  libswresample   0. 16.100 /  0. 16.100
rtsp://192.168.1.99:7654/test2-rtsp: Invalid data found when processing input

Server's output:

Thu Oct 18 11:57:51 2012 FFserver started.
Thu Oct 18 11:58:01 2012 192.168.1.101 - - [DESCRIBE] "rtsp://192.168.1.99:7654/test2-rtsp RTSP/1.0" 200 167
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I don't really know what I could be missing. I've just read in the official doc that streaming from a file is kind of broken. Since I don't really know if that's up to date, I decided to give it a try here.

Any help or suggestions? Alternatives?

Solution 1

If you are looking for alternatives live555 (http://www.live555.com/ ) and darwin servers are good options. I have used them both and the behave well while streaming from file.

In the above case you can even try debugging by analyzing core dump. By looking at the logs I think server is crashing even before receiving a play command. So it may be a small hick-up somewhere

Solution 2

Only 4 years later...

You can't stream mp4 videos using FFserver because it contains global metadata in the file header - making random stream access impossible. [source]

Possible alternative:

// convert awesome.mp4 to awesome.flv

$ ffmpeg -i awesome.mp4 -c:v libx264 -ar 22050 -crf 28 awesome.flv 

For more on FFmpeg... go to blog.