The VideoLAN Forums

Yello,

My question is fairly simple but, is it possible, at all, to feed VLC a raw h.264 stream over the network? Basically I have a processor that is capture video from a camera and encoding it into H.264, that stream is then sent out over the network (currently over TCP) to a java program that is saving it to a file, but what I would like to be able to do is to just display that steam via VLC without having to save it. Is it possible to do this via a raw UDP steam or something, or will I have to encapsulate the steam and / or write a RTP protocol ontop of it?

rtp/h264 should work, no?

It should, but that wasn't my question, basically atm I have a H.264 stream directly over a TCP port to a java program, I know VLC can't pickup the TCP but what if I did the same as a UDP stream, would VLC be able to work out that it was a raw H.264 video steam and play it or would it not understand the stream?

I need to know if I will have to ether encapsulate the H.264 stream to get VLC to play it, or if I will need to write some code to convert it to a RTP stream or both. Or if VLC will be able to play it as is, I need to get a demonstration system working by Thursday (although I really only have tomorrow to sort it) so I'm just trying to work out how much work is required so I can decide whether or not to use my backup plan and to look into VLC later.

The demonstration system I'm working on is a CCTV project, I have a Duel core Blackfin DSP running a h.264 encoder on one core, that passes the raw h.264 stream and the encoders motion vector information over to the second core that is running uClinux. uClinux then transmits both information over two different ports to a java program, atm that java program displays the motion vector information in a visible format and saving the H.264 stream to a file which VLC will play.

What I want to do is display that stream directly and overlay the motion data ontop of it, I have a way I can do that by using Zuggle, but if I can get the java VLC library to do the same thing it'll give me more flexibility moving on from that point. But due to the time contrasts I'm trying to find out if I have the time to implement it now, or if I should look into it later, and the burning question is whether or not I need to reformat the stream being transmitted from the Blackfin.

That's probably more information then is really needed but the first two paragraphs are the important bits

Edit: Well I couldn't get UDP/H.264 to work but that might of been an issue with how I was sending the data, I did a test with a raw H.264 using VLC to stream over RTP to another VLC and that worked so I'll take that root in the long run.