Problem with both playing and streaming: vivotek ip camera

[redscare]

Hi to all,

After searching the forums and reading every "vlc crash/freezes when doing X" I've decided to open my own thread to see if someone can help with with my specific problem.

I've got an old Vivotek 3121 IP camera. It outputs MPEG4 video (no sound) via rtsp://192.168.../live.sdp

I'd like to use VLC for both unicast streaming and recording to file. Right now VLC hangs after 10seconds-2minutes of playing the stream, or after 1-2minutes of saving to disk (via command line without locally displaying), or after 30 seconds of streaming to another client (another VLC or Quicktime).

I must add that the camera is completely stable when accessing directly to it via Quicktime 7.

I've tried both the latest stable release and the latest nightly build. They only differ in the ammount of time it takes for vlc to hang/crash.

So, the question is: What kind of information should I post here so you can help me debug what's going on? Wireshark captures? The sdp file? VLC log? (how do I activate it, btw?).

I can also try it in linux (using vmware) if you think it can make a difference.

Meanwhile I'll try using older versions of vlc, as it seems some people using vlc for the same purposes as myself, had it working using 0.8.6a or 0.8.6d.

Thanks!

[kenzo1982]

I had a similar problem getting the stream from an MPEG4 encoder vía RTSP. It seems that lastest releases of VLC have the same problem with rstp input sources. The connection is closed after some seconds. In my case, vlc 0.8.6d and older versions works fine.

Regards

[redscare]

Version 0.8.6d is more stable. I can stream from the camera to DSS (which has problems accessing to the camera directly) and use any client to view the stream. But the joy last only 5 minutes. Much more than previous attempts with latests build, but not good enough yet.

I'll try a 0.8.6a. Btw, it's really weird go back in version history to get better features and performance

[VLC_help]

Right now VLC hangs

VLC freezes completely or streaming just stops? Have you tried to check logs (before starting streaming, Tools -> Messages set verbosity to 2)?

[redscare]

Right now VLC hangs

VLC freezes completely or streaming just stops? Have you tried to check logs (before starting streaming, Tools -> Messages set verbosity to 2)?

Well, it's weird. I'm not sure it's VLC's fault (I mean 0.8.6, as 0.9.x clearly doesn't work for this).

After those 4:40 - 5:00 minutes, the camera sends a TCP [ACK, FIN] that, judging by the sequence numbers, seems to be related to the initial three-way-handshake for rtsp protocol.

Then VLC answers with an ACK, then the camera starts sending ICMP messages that fail (port not responding). Why the ICMP messages? No idea. My networking protocols knowledge doesn't reach so far

So v0.8.6x (all "letters" work except version 'a') doesn't hang. The stream ends and I don't know who to blame. I'll make some more experiments, have a look at the logs and maybe update the camera firmware (I know some versions of the camera firmware had some "duplicate acks" problem).

Anyway, I hope the vlc team fixes current version and we can soon see a 0.9.3 or 0.9.4 that works in this regard

EDIT: Regarding versions 0.9.x, VLC indeed hangs. I can still see all the rtp packets going from the camera to my pc.

[VLC_help]

VLC 0.9.4 is already released, so fix won't make to that. By hang you mean you have to use task manager to kill the process?