MJPEG relay IP Cam

[xcelsion]

Dear VideoLAN community,

I have an assignment that requires me to make a video stream available to a large amount of people. The source for the video is an IP Camera that is located in our office and looks out over a town square. The problem with this is that the IP Cam can only support so many viewers. I was thinking of capturing the stream and re-broadcasting it using VLC. Unfortunately I haven't had much luck getting it to work.

The camera uses MJPEG format for the video. The link is http://cam_ip:6001/cgi-bin/sf.cgi I can open this link in Firefox directly and it plays the stream just fine. However when I try to open this in VLC I get an error message saying the MRL could not be opened. It tells me to check the log file for further details but I don't know where to find it. I thought it was located in %appdata%/vlc but there is no log file there. It's not in program files/VideoLAN/vlc either

I hope you guys can help me out, or at least point me in the right direction.

[Sébastien Escudier]

Yes, vlc can''t open cgi.
You have to find the url of the mjpeg stream.
Ask your vendor.

[xcelsion]

I was afraid that would be the case

[Sébastien Escudier]

But I'm sure the camera have a "normal" stream url...

[xcelsion]

I've sent an e-mail to eminent asking about it, fingers crossed.

[aristeos]

Try adding "?.mjpeg" to the end of your URL when you open the network location in VLC (in my case it looks like this: http://127.0.0.1/MJPEG.CGI?.mjpeg). The camera http server should ignore everything after the question mark and the .mjpeg tells VLC how to interpret the stream. I had similar problems with a D-Link camera and this solution worked perfectly. Hope this helps.

@aristeos

[arend]

Just for future reference:

Look at the source of the page presented by the ip cam: http://cam_ip:6001/cgi-bin/sf.cgi
There should be an image tag like <img src="/videofeed" alt="Video feed"/>
In this case, this is your mjpeg stream url: http://cam_ip:6001/videofeed