The VideoLAN Forums

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.

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

I was afraid that would be the case

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

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

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

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