Sony IP Camera format issues

[andrewppp]

I suspect that Sony are embedding their camera metadata into the video in an illegal fashion (I have lost the use of my expensive analyzer and so can't nail it down). They call it .cam format and that extension is used irrespective of the encoding they use (MJPEG, MPEG4, H.264). They have proprietary players for it which do parse this metadata. These players have an explicit export function to AVI, suggesting that this most likely isn't legal MPEG. Walled garden, yada yada.

I notice that RTSP playback in VLC is slightly ragged and jumpy, and I further suspect that VLC is having trouble with this metadata. If I record without transcoding, the video is still jumpy on playback. I confirmed this by playing the ActiveX display directly from the camera HTTP side-by-side with VLC's RTSP playback, and looked at the date/time fields. It then becomes clear that there's an issue. I'd be pleased to provide a fragment of such a stream if anyone has a decent analyzer and the inclination to dive in.

I will probably also build and debug VLC to breakpoint wherever this data is (presumably) tossed or skipped over, but I'm currently a n00b on VLC builds. I actually need this metadata for my own app, but that's another story. Perhaps I'll get to the point where I can offer some new code to the project, if this problem is real.

I'd like to get some more information from people using these cameras with VLC. So have others noticed this problem?