See the last post for the final solution. The solution in this post has some issues. However, it can still be used after hacking ffmpeg.c.
I thought I would share my solution for streaming legacy MJPEG network cameras through Wowza. I used ffmpeg and ffserver to transcode a MJPEG stream from a Canon VC-C50i to H.264. I did this on OS-X, but this should work on any *nix machine. This solution was adapted from here.
This is the proof of concept version of a production solution.
Prerequisites
ffmpeg source
libx264
Wowza Media Server 2
If you want to test the resulting H.264 stream with VLC, then you will need to modify ffserver as outlined here.
I used ffmpeg r25013. Later releases seem to give me problems for which I have not worked out yet.
ffserver.conf
# Port on which the server is listening. You must select a different
# port from your standard HTTP web server if it is running on the same
# computer.
Port 8090
# Address on which the server is bound. Only useful if you have
# several network interfaces.
BindAddress 0.0.0.0
RTSPBindAddress 0.0.0.0
RTSPPort 554
# Number of simultaneous HTTP connections that can be handled. It has
# to be defined *before* the MaxClients parameter, since it defines the
# MaxClients maximum limit.
MaxHTTPConnections 20000
# Number of simultaneous requests that can be handled. Since FFServer
# is very fast, it is more likely that you will want to leave this high
# and use MaxBandwidth, below.
MaxClients 20000
# This the maximum amount of kbit/sec that you are prepared to
# consume when streaming to clients.
MaxBandwidth 100000
# Access log file (uses standard Apache log file format)
# '-' is the standard output.
CustomLog -
# Suppress that if you want to launch ffserver as a daemon.
NoDaemon
<Feed feed1.ffm>
File /tmp/feed1.ffm #when remarked, no file is beeing created and the stream keeps working!!
FileMaxSize 200K
# Only allow connections from localhost to the feed.
ACL allow 127.0.0.1
</Feed>
<Stream live.h264>
Format rtp
Feed feed1.ffm
VideoCodec libx264
VideoFrameRate 5
VideoBitRate 100
VideoSize 320x240
AVPresetVideo default
AVPresetVideo baseline
AVOptionVideo flags +global_header
NoAudio
</Stream>
<Stream stat.html>
Format status
</Stream>
<Redirect index.html>
# credits!
URL http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/
</Redirect>
I use a php script from the command line to stream from the Canon cams and pipe into ffmpeg. These scrips were adapted from a blog post I can not find.
HTTP PHP Streamer (pull_stream_http.php). I have found for the canon cams it is more reliable to use the TCP streaming port. I will post that php script if someone wants it.
<?php
// Simple log
$fp = fopen("log.txt", "w");
//Run forever
while(true) {
$err_no = TRUE ;
$contents = '';
$handle = fopen("http://CAMERA_IP:PORT/-wvhttp-01-/getoneshot?frame_count=0", "rb");
if($handle === FALSE) {
fwrite($fp, "Connect failed - Retrying\r\n") ;
sleep(100) ;
continue ;
}
fwrite($fp, "Connected to camera\r\n") ;
//Test for EOF and exit if the pipe is closed
while (!feof($handle)) {
print fread($handle, 8192);
}
fclose($handle);
fwrite($fp, "Connection Failed - Sleeping\r\n") ;
sleep(100) ;
}
?>
The two shell scripts
server.sh
#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]
do
ffserver -loglevel verbose
done
stream.sh
#!/bin/bash
while [ 1 ]
do
php -f pull_stream_http.php | ffmpeg -an -f mjpeg -maxrate 500 -r 6 -i - 6 http://localhost:8090/feed1.ffm
done
Now just start the server and then the stream. You should be able to connect to rtsp://localhost:554/live.h264 with VLC (assuming you modified ffserver). If you do not see a stream check the ffserver console log. If you do not see a request then ffserver has not opened port 554. Make sure the user level you are running at allows access to this port.
After you confirm it is streaming all you need to do is setup an application in Wowza. Set the content stream to rtsp://localhost:554/live.h264
You could simply use ffserver to do all the streaming, but I have found Wowza to be much more reliable. This also allows you to move the transcoding to another machine.
I hope this helps.
