Can I subscribe to Ant Media streams via VLC?

[Zaun]

I just started evaluating with Ant Media Server Community Edition 1.6.1.

I can publish RTMP (via OBS) and RTSP streams (via a gst server and wowza) to the Ant server and I can view with Ant's built-in HLS Flowplayer. But, I don't know how to subscribe Ant's output streams using VLC 3.0.4. I'm evaluating everything on localhost (Ubuntu 18.04). I gave my LiveApp stream the name of "wcam" and it says "Broadcasting1.00x" (Quality: Good). The <stream-id> is from the provided LiveApp embed link. I then tried these network URLs with VLC:

http://localhost:5080/LiveApp/streams/<stream-id>.m3u8

VLC connects but doesn't show anything. I entered the network URL once in one instance of VLC. The corresponding Ant LiveApp instance shows the number of HLS clients connected increases about one per second without end. It appears that VLC keeps retrying without closing the previous connection. I killed VLC when Ant reported the number of clients had reached 21. When the one instance of VLC was killed, the number of clients decreased over time back to 0.

rtmp://localhost/LiveApp/wcam

rtmp://localhost/LiveApp/<stream-id>

rtsp://localhost:5554/LiveApp/wcam

rtsp://localhost:5554/LiveApp/<stream-id>

rtsp://localhost:5554/LiveApp/streams/<stream-id>.sdp

None of these open or connect. Obviously, I have some basic misunderstanding about how to subscribe with VLC.

Red5 Pro has a way of displaying the list of available stream URLs that clients can connect to. It would be nice if Ant did the same. -Zaun

[Selim Emre]

Hi zaun,

Thank you for your interest. Could you try by following the steps below ?

1- Please create New Live Stream in LiveApp

2- Please check HLS Stream is Enabled ?

3- Please check OBS Stream Setting.

4- Now you can play HLS or RTMP in VLC. if the problem persists, can you try with local IP (like 192.168.1.3) instead of localhost?

I'm hoping that I was able to answer your queries, Zuan. Please feel free to get back to us if you still have any questions.

Best Regards,

Selim

[Zaun]

Selim, thanks for your help. I have no problem providing Ant with an RTMP stream (from say OBS). RTSP from Wowza also works. I don't even have to give Wowsa a SETUP Transport header to receive a RTSP over TCP stream from it. The VLC RTSP server is totally incompatible with Ant because VLC only supports RTSP over UDP, it seems. I can see in the tcpdump packet output that Ant is trying to use the TCP-only transport first:

SETUP rtsp://127.0.0.1:8566/webcam/trackID=0 RTSP/1.0

Transport: RTP/AVP/TCP;unicast;interleaved=0-1

CSeq: 3

User-Agent: Lavf57.83.100

But the VLC server always returns: "461 Client error" meaning "Unsupported transport". (Is there a way to show this in the Ant console logs instead of having it silently not work?)

In our case, we are using a custom streaming server we built using C/C++ g-streamer components. All our clients, thus far, prefer to work with RTSP over UDP multicast and unicast.  It appears that the Ant RTSP receiver only supports RTSP over TCP. Is that correct?

G-streamer supports RTSP over TCP but we never really tested that mode. There appears to be some compatibility issue between gst-server and Ant in this regard. It looks like gst-server tries to work in the TCP-transport only mode but it looks like something is getting corrupted. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Ant claims to be broadcasting the received RTSP stream from gst-streamer but nothing useful is coming out the other end most of the time. We're trying to sort this out at our end. Otherwise, our gst-server works well with all our other RTSP clients including VLC.

Is there some debug trace option in Ant that might help us understand what Ant is not liking about the RTSP stream it is getting?  -Jim

[Selim Emre]

Hi Zaun,

Thank you for your interest. Sorry for the delay. We work hard these days. Unfortunately, we doesn't support ingest and play RTSP streaming. We only support fetching camera RTSP and playing WebRTC & HLS. When fetching RTSP,  yes we only take the stream with TCP. We add UDP support, but since it will be a special solution, you need to purchase the Enterprise Edition(annual). I hope you understand us.

Please feel free to get back to us if you still have any questions.

Best Regards,

Selim