The VideoLAN Forums

Hi all.

If VLC can do what I need, then it will be a lifesaver for me.

I have an IP security cam with a built in webserver. I would like to be able to use VLC in order to stream the live video from the IP cam to a website. Reading the documentation, it appears that using a command line setup something like this (I got this from the manual):

% vlc -vvv input_stream --sout '#transcode{vcodec=mpeg4,vb=800,ab=128}:
standard{access=http,mux=ogg,dst=server.example.org:8080}'

Assuming this will work (or please tell me if it won't), I have some questions:

• - How do I get VLC to see the ip cam to stream it?
  - What do 'vb' and 'ab' mean in that command string?
  - What is the most stable and best performing vcodec and encapsulation methods to use for such a setup? I would like to have audio as an option, but it is not required and most of the time there will be no audio on this stream.
  - Do I need to have this running on the same machine that runs the apache webserver for the website I want to broadcast it on?

Thanks a bunch!

First of all you should be able to open your webcam stream with vlc and the video 4 linux device (strg-c). If you can not do this all other doesnt work.

Second you should be able to set the stream chain and you can use two instances of vlc to proof working. use strg-s to setup the streaming chain and open a second instances to control if this works. For webcam live streaming you should use low bandwith and frame rate.

Third you should setup a webserver with the vlc html-plugin-code (read the wiki) or use the revolunet vlc plugin (use your favorite search engine). On your client pc you should install vlc with the correspondending browser plugin.

Last but not least read the docu, wiki and some posts in this forum and use the message box with log-level 2 if you have problems.

Thanks rh for the reply. Do I need to capture the video before streaming it? That may sound like a dumb question, but because it's an IP cam with it's own built in webserver, it already has a default http webpage which the video can be viewed in. But I want to stream it because I want to embed the live video from the cam into my own webpage. Can I not just put it's IP into VLC as a network source to stream? Thanks for any advice.

You dont need to stream this for your goal. You can simply embedding the site from your cam in your website with many serverbased scripting plugins depends from your webserver installation like java, php, python and so on.