The VideoLAN Forums

Hey all,

I'm having a bit of trouble getting h.264 video files to play in VLC when I stream them. I am streaming using RTP/UDP, and using wireshark I can see that VLC does receive the packets. However, no video ever opens.

Looking through the forums has shown me that VLC typically needs some form of an SDP file, yet I know that my stream is sending out the parameter sets every second, and thus don't think that it should be necessary. Is there some form of a workaround to have VLC read type 7 & 8 NALU's that get sent every second to know how to decode the video?

I have been able to take the stream, remove the RTP headers, place NALU headers on, and save to a file. VLC can play this file, so I'm not sure why it couldn't play the original stream, given that there is no change in information.

What you use to create that stream? vlc 1.1.0 has known bug with h264 streaming in ts-muxer which is fixed in nightly builds and next 1.1.1.

Its actually a raw H264 file; the packets that are sent are fragmented NALU's and, besides the RTP headers, there isn't any container (.ts, mpg, etc). VLC can play the stream if I use the live555 streaming library to send it as RTSP instead, but that won't always be an option for what I need...