VLC
About VLC
This page describe uses of VLC with Elphel cameras.
VLC is easy to install on Windows (r), OS X or GNU/Linux, run the same way and do same things on all those platform.
Another interesting thing in VLC is the plugins architecture and the AJAX web interface.
Plugins can be used for example for digital zoom, transcoding, mosaic with 4,6,9,16,... cameras, realtime processing, ...
I have successfully transcoded and recorded to mpeg4 video and viewed the result in the same time. It work on my notebook. (thinkpad T60 Intel Core2 2GHz, 2 GB RAM)
play the stream
so the first basic thing you can do with VLC is to play both unicast or multicast stream from the camera.
vlc rtsp://192.168.0.9:554
Replace 192.168.0.9 with the IP address of your camera.
restream
VLC is much more than just a video player.
You can also use it to receive a live video stream, re-encode/transcode and broadcast/restream it again.
The following command does:
- opens the camera stream (unicast or multicast) from *CAMERA-IP*
- resizes resolution to 50%
- limits FPS to 12,
- re-encodes the stream in Theora
- set Video Bitrate to 3600
- streams it on all interfaces on port 8080
vlc rtsp://*CAMERA-IP*:554 --sout '#transcode{vcodec=theo,vb=3600,scale=0.5,fps=12}:duplicate{dst=std{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=0.0.0.0:8080}}'
To open this encoded stream on a client PC (maybe over Internet) you just need to open http://vlc_server_ip:8080 in a video player.
Alternateively you can also use the GStreamer framework to reencode & restream.
