RTSP-Stream-Video-Capturer

RTSP stream Video Capturer

This sample application shows how to use a video capturer being used by a publisher in your application. It is important to note that a custom video capturer always belongs to a given publisher. The video capturer captures video frames from a RTSP stream. A publisher using this video capturer pipes the RTSP stream into a OpenTok session.

This sample builds upon the Publisher Only sample, but with a publisher that uses a RTSP stream video capturer.

You will need a valid Vonage Video API account to build this app. (Note that OpenTok is now the Vonage Video API.)

Setting up your environment

OpenTok SDK

Building this sample application requires having a local installation of the OpenTok Linux SDK.

On Debian-based Linuxes

The OpenTok Linux SDK for x86_64 is available as a Debian package. We maintain our own Debian repository on packagecloud. For Debian 12, follow these steps to install the packages from our repository.

• Add packagecloud repository:

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/tokbox/debian/script.deb.sh | sudo bash

• Install the OpenTok Linux SDK packages.

sudo apt install libopentok-dev

On non-Debian-based Linuxes

Download the OpenTok SDK from https://tokbox.com/developer/sdks/linux/ and extract it and set the LIBOPENTOK_PATH environment variable to point to the path where you extracted the SDK. For example:

wget https://tokbox.com/downloads/libopentok_linux_llvm_x86_64-2.28.2
tar xvf libopentok_linux_llvm_x86_64-2.28.2
export LIBOPENTOK_PATH=<path_to_SDK>

Other dependencies

Before building the sample application you will need to install the following dependencies

On Debian-based Linuxes

sudo apt install build-essential cmake clang libc++-dev libc++abi-dev \
    pkg-config libasound2 libpulse-dev libsdl2-dev libopencv-dev

On Fedora

sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"
sudo dnf install SDL2-devel clang pkg-config libcxx-devel libcxxabi-devel cmake opencv-devel

Note that this sample app has been tested to work with OpenCV 4.5.

Building and running the sample app

Once you have installed the dependencies, you can build the sample application. Since it's good practice to create a build folder, let's go ahead and create it in the project directory:

$ mkdir RTSP-Stream-Video-Capturer/build

Copy the config-sample.h file as config.h at RTSP-Stream-Video-Capturer/:

$ cp common/src/config-sample.h  RTSP-Stream-Video-Capturer/config.h

Edit the config.h file and add your OpenTok API key, an OpenTok session ID, and token for that session. For test purposes, you can obtain a session ID and token from the project page in your Vonage Video API account. However, in a production application, you will need to dynamically obtain the session ID and token from a web service that uses one of the Vonage Video API server SDKs.

Edit the main.cpp file and the RTSP URL you want to capture video frames from.

#define DEFAULT_RTSP_SERVER_URL "<My RTSP URL>"

If you do not have a RTSP camera avaible you can install VLC to run a RTSP server. For example,

vlc -vvv SampleVideo_720x480_20mb.mp4 --sout '#rtp{dst=127.0.0.1,port=1234,sdp=rtsp://127.0.0.1:8080/test.sdp}'

and then the RTSP URL would be

#define DEFAULT_RTSP_SERVER_URL "rtsp://127.0.0.1:8080/test.sdp"

Next, create the building bits using cmake:

$ cd RTSP-Stream-Video-Capturer/build
$ CC=clang CXX=clang++ cmake ..

Note we are using clang/clang++ compilers.

Use make to build the code:

$ make

When the rtsp_stream_video_capturer binary is built, run it:

$ ./rtsp_stream_video_capturer

You can use the OpenTok Playground to connect to the OpenTok session in a web browser, view the stream published by the RTSP Stream Video Capturer app, and publish a stream that the app can subscribe to.

You can end the sample application by typing Control + C in the console.

Next steps

See the Vonage Video API developer center for more information on the OpenTok Linux SDK.