VLC cannot open rtsp

[montagu]

hi
I upgraded my pc (athlon 64 4000+; NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS open suse 12.1 and KDE 4.7.2 (4.7.2) "release 5")
and downloaded VLC 1.13-2-2, but it does work when I want to watch video streaming.

I get the following msg:
VLC ne peut pas ouvrir « rtsp://mafreebox.freebox.fr/fbxtv_pub/stream?namespace=1&service=100008 ».
(VLC cant open ...)

In the message window, I get this:
access_realrtsp warning: only real/helix rtsp servers supported for now

It doesnt seem to have anything to do with the firewall, because disconnecting the latter has no effect

my other pc, on which I installed suse 12.1 and vlc 1.12-13 a few weeks ago works fine when opening the same url

I'd appreciate any help. I've spent a lot of time checking forums, to no avail

montagu

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Probably your build does not have the RTSP input module.
Check it with the plugins dialog and look for live555

[montagu]

thank you for the advice

I installed (with yast2) live555-devel, which was the only software with "live555" in it,
I then checked vlc->tools->plugins->modules and found

name type score
- Real RTSP access 10
- RTSO VoD server vod server 1

and VLC still doesnt work

I have the intuition that the problem is with VLC rather than the 12.1 distro, because
VLC 1.12-13 works on the other computer which has 12.1 installed the same way,
but about a month earlier

montagu

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

You did not install the VLC live555 plugin as JB said, so it still does not work.

[montagu]

Please be patient with me, I am not a computer scientist, only a very average user.

I added the vlc repository to yast, and still no live555 appeared on the modules
that can be installed

I looked for a live555 rpm on the net, but found nothing for suse 12.1, and have no clue
on how to install it other than with an rpm. configure and make are rather foreign to me.

I also looked for options to load plugins from the vlc toolbar, but there doesnt seem to
be any

montagu

PS.
after some more searching, I found a live555-2009.07.28-1.5 RPM for i586, which I installed after removing
the live555-devel (I had to because it obsoleted the former), and vlc still doesnt work.

[Sébastien Escudier]

You need a vlc compiled with live555 module.
Not the live555 library package

[montagu]

thank you, this is what I needed to read.

there is an explanation on this forum on how to compile vlc with live555 module,
but for one thing it dates from 2007, and for another I am not sure, considering my
level of competence, that I will be able to compile successfully the vlc source
(with or without that module).

- Would installing live555 library and then installing vlc from rpm work?

- Is there a way to install a live555 plugin with vlc already installed, as
the term "plugin" suggests?

- why do I need to do this for vlc 1.1.13 and not for previous versions of vlc,
considering that I installed the vlc package tailored for the right version of
suse each time?

montagu

[Sébastien Escudier]

- Would installing live555 library and then installing vlc from rpm work?

No

- Is there a way to install a live555 plugin with vlc already installed, as
the term "plugin" suggests?

You could add the plugin in the plugin directory, but it would need to be compiled for the vlc version you have

- why do I need to do this for vlc 1.1.13 and not for previous versions of vlc,
considering that I installed the vlc package tailored for the right version of
suse each time?

I don't know why it is not included in your vlc installation. To be sure type :
vlc --list | grep live555

[montagu]

ok, true enough, live555 does not appear when I do vlc --list

It appears on the other computers with older versions of vlc,
and I know that vlc 1.13 works with ubuntu 11.10, so it seems
live555 was just left out of vlc 1.1.13 for suse 12.1.

So what lies ahead for me is to compile vlc from the sources, right?
I am already starting to sweat at the idea of struggling with this.
Are you sure there is no other (simpler) way?
wait for the next version of vlc?

required libraries
I suppose I can first install live555-devel with an rpm, and then add
somewhere in the configure file of vlc:
--enable-live555
--with-live555-path=/usr/local/lib/live # or whatever path live needs

or should I download all the required libraries? Why files/subdirectories of
ftp://ftp.videolan.org/pub/videolan/contrib/
would that be

thank you for your patience with a newbie

montagu

PS. It occurred to me since making this last post that I could try compile
the live555-latest and add the plugin, but how do you do that?
I didnt find any /plugins subdirectory in /usr/share/vlc

[montagu]

well, believe it or not, I uninstalled vlc and live555, tried to install an older version again,
didnt work, reinstalled live555, reinstalled vlc, and video streaming works!

as my friend and collegue Jacques often says: "les mysteres de l'informatique sont insondables"

thank you for pointing out to me that live555 was needed for rstp access

[cycchow]

I have the same problem, so should i compile the live555 first and then reinstall vlc rpm?

[montagu]

Why dont you just try?

I would be interested to know if it works for you too.

if not, I'll try and figure out what else I did that made
the video streaming work

montagu

[cycchow]

i need to compile the vlc but not just install the rpm. it work with rtsp, but seems some codec is missing.... need to recompile again.............

[mali44]

salut,

Pardon mais je suis plus à l'aise en français.
une question, tu essaies de regarder freeplayer via une passerelle, ton micro sous Opensuse, ou tu es directement connecté à internet?
si tu passes par une passerelle il faut charger le module RTSP-conntrack dans le kernel de la passerelle pour que ça marche.
J'ai cette config chez moi et ça marche très bien.

[montagu]

I am back at square one, because my hard-disk died and I had to reinstall linux, and now of course installing live555
and then vlc doesnt maked rtsp streaming work. Last time I tried all kinds of things, and of course one of them enabled
rtsp streaming, but which one?

After some search, it seems that the live555 plugin, which is needed for rtsp streaming, should be in the vlc-nox package.
Anyway, that's where it is in the vlc package for debian SO. I assume that this live555 was in previous versions of vlc-nox
for suse, that would explain why I only encountered the problem recently, and never before.

Looking at my other computer with suse 12.1 and vlc 1.12-13, there is a liblive555.plugin.so in
the directory /usr/lib/vlc/plugin/demux. I suppose that this is where I have to put this plugin once
I have found it and compiled it

so my question is : where do I find the source for this live555 plugin that is appropriate for vlc 1.13, and is there a readme to help compile it?

montagu
PS. answer to the last post :
j'utilise vlc, pas freeplayer (parce que je n'ai pas de tv). je n'utilise pas de passerelle, je vais sur
internet via la freebox configuree en routeur. merci quand meme.

[Sébastien Escudier]

you can try to copy liblive555.plugin.so from your 12.1 suse in the plugin directory.

If you want to compile it yourself you would need to get vlc sources (from git) and compile live555 library in the vlc contrib system, and compile the live555 module.

[montagu]

I am sorry, I should have done my homework before posting this query.

Putting the missing module in the plugin directory was the obvious first thing to try, and, lo and behold, it works, vlc now allows rtsp streaming. If I had been out of luck, the next thing was to look for live555 in the list of contrib libraries on the vlc site, and there it is.

However, even if I now dont need to do any more diddling to get rtsp streaming, I would still like to know how this all works.

- You say I should compile the live555 library "in the vlc contrib system" : does that mean I have to compile it in a special way, or do you mean that I have to retrieve it from the vlc contrib system before compiling it?

- And since this library is available as an rpm binary for suse 12.1, cant I just install the rpm?

- next I have to compile the live555 module. Now how do I do that? where is that module? what is it called?

- do I then have to move and/or rename the result of the compilation and move it to the plugins directory?

These questions may sound stupidly naive to specialists, but I would be thankful for some explanations, I am willing to
learn, and next time maybe I'll manage to deal with the problem without resorting to a forum.

If I dont get any feedback, I have one last request :
I respectfully ask the developers of vlc to include this live555 module/plugin in their future versions of vlc for suse
(and other OS, in case I get tired of suse: ).

montagu

[Sébastien Escudier]

- You say I should compile the live555 library "in the vlc contrib system" : does that mean I have to compile it in a special way, or do you mean that I have to retrieve it from the vlc contrib system before compiling it?

You have to retrieve and compile the library from the contrib system, and then compile vlc.

- next I have to compile the live555 module. Now how do I do that? where is that module? what is it called?

it's in modules/demux/

If I dont get any feedback, I have one last request :
I respectfully ask the developers of vlc to include this live555 module/plugin in their future versions of vlc for suse
(and other OS, in case I get tired of suse: ).

Vlc developers do not compile vlc for linux distributions. Ask to the suse maintainers.

[kmf31]

I have encountered the same problem with the binary vlc-2.0.0-rpm for opensuse 12.1 which is in my opinion broken due to a simple build problem of this binary package.

After installing vlc-2.0.0 for opensuse 12.1 I could simply not access to the RTSP stream of my provider Free (in France there are about 4.5 million customers of Free having potentially access to this RTSP stream), exactly the same stream mentioned by montagu and I have the same error message:
"access_realrtsp warning: only real/helix rtsp servers supported for now"

and the reason is of course the missing live555 plugin, which I could very well use in former versions of vlc (and an old opensuse installation). However the command "vlc -vv" shows the arguments of ./configure when vlc was compiled and here it is clearly mentioned that live555 is enabled.

Therefore I have downloaded and installed all devel-rpms for the libraries
(mostly from here:
http://download.videolan.org/pub/videol ... .1/x86_64/ )
and the vlc-2.0.0 sources, applied the two patches in the src.rpm of opensuse (available from here: http://download.videolan.org/pub/videol ... /12.1/src/ ) and recompiled vlc (explicitely activating live555 !!) and it still did not work and the live555 plugins are still missing.

The problem is that in the package live555-devel the static libraries (there are no dynamic libraries for live555, at least not by default ) are in the folder:
/usr/lib64/live/ which is NOT in the standard libary path and therefore the configure script of vlc does not recognize these libraries even though the header files are well present in live555-devel. Furthermore, the old option "--with-live555-tree" or "--with-live555-path" from former vlc versions where it was possible to configure a non-standard folder for live555 has disappeared in the configure script of vlc-2.0.0. Therefore vlc searches for live555 only in the standard place /usr/include/<some_live_subfolders> for the headers (which is okay !) but when the configure script tries to compile and link a test programm with -lliveMedia it does not work because the libraries are not in a standard place and the configure script does not contain an option like "-L/usr/lib64/live". As a result the actual opensuse build of vlc does not include the live555 plugin.
One should also mention that live555 is a special library which does not use the pkg-config tool which allows for other libraries to be placed in non-standard directories and in addition the live makefile does not include a "install" target to copy the files in some nice standard place. Therefore when installing live555 from source one has to copy headers and libraries manually to standard places or to use an environment variable for the library path etc.

Furthermore for 64bit systems there is in live555 src.rpm (used by opensuse) a patch to add the -fPIC option in the config.linux file. However, I found that this (old patch) did not correctly apply because the file config.linux was write protected. I do not know if this patch was correctly applied in the live555-devel rpm of opensuse. Actually for 64 bit systems it is in any case better to use config.linux-64bit.

In summary I solved the compile problem as follows:
1) I installed live555-devel (for the header files)
2) I used the live555 source package to compile live555 with the -fPIC option (using "./genMakefiles linux-64bit" and "make" ) and than I copied the four library.a files
(which are: libBasicUsageEnvironment.a libliveMedia.a libgroupsock.a and libUsageEnvironment.a) produced by the compilation of live in a standard place (/usr/lib64 and NOT /usr/lib64/live). In addition I a made also copies to library_pic.a for each of theses files (I am not sure if this is necessary, probably not).
3) Then I recompiled vlc (with some special path to avoid a conflict with the vlc-rpm package) and here I obtained the live555 plugins. This new version of vlc works perfectly with my RTSP stream and in addition when copying the live555 plugin manually from the new to the existing vlc installation (from the rpm package) it also works with RTSP.

For those who also want to use RTSP with vlc in opensuse 12.1 they can get the two live555 plugin files and a small README from here:

http://dl.free.fr/lEBiEyzRo

(This link remains valid 30 days after the last download.) Simply unpack the tar.gz file with "tar xvzf liblive555_plugin.tar.gz" and proceed as given in README_live.

In the meantime it would be nice if the build of the vlc-opensuse rpm on videolan could be repaired (I am not sure if here is the right place to mention it ?). For example by adding in live555-devel symbolic links of the four library files from /usr/lib64/live/ to /usr/lib64/ and compiling vlc afterwards. I am not sure about the -fPIC option and the patch, if this patch applies correctly or not ? Maybe this should also be modified, maybe by using config.linux-64bit instead of config.linux.

I any case I am very grateful to the developpers and people of videolan for all the work and also the nice things such as to provide binaries for opensuse which in principle install very nicely !



PS: concerning the firewall configuration for RTSP streaming I draw the attention to this very nice external kernel module: rtsp-module-2.6.36.tar.gz available here:
http://mike.it-loops.com/rtsp/
which installs very nicely in opensuse 12.1 with kernel 3.1 (provided the kernel sources are installed) and I suppose in nearly every other linux system with a recent kernel. After "make" and "make install" (as root) not forget "depmod -a" and then
"modprobe nf_nat_rtsp".
In principle using standard firewall rules, i.e.:
-A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
this module allows to use rtsp without manually opening the udp-ports. (However, the opensuse firewall is a bit tricky here due to more complicated rules.)
The real good thing is when using the rtsp-module in a linux-nat routeur where it greatly simplify things for the RTSP-vlc-clients behind the routeur !

[Sébastien Escudier]

Yes, the vlc-2.0.0 opensuse package must have been compiled without live555 support.

About your compilation, a simpler solution is to use the vlc contrib system (in vlc/contrib source tree) :
bootstrap, and make .live555
and enable the --with-contrib when ./configure vlc.

[kmf31]

Thank you for the information. I have looked in the vlc-2.0.0 source folder and inside the directory contrib I find a structure "contrib/src/src/<contrib-sources>". However, when looking in the file bootstrap in contrib it seems to me that the structure should be "contrib/src/<contrib-sources>". (In the new git versions (vlc-2.0.1 and vlc-2.1) this is already corrected.)
May be the buildproblem for live555 support in vlc opensuse-binary is related to this ?

[dimstar]

Hi all,

a quick note to the packager sometimes helps to get packaging issues fixed In this case it did take a bit longer, as I do not follow the fora on a daily base... yet: new vlc (and vlc-beta) rpms should be published and live555 support should be enabled again...

If there are other issues, please let me know.

[kmf31]

Thanks for the information. Actually just this morning I looked at the ftp site of videolan in the opensuse folder (for 12.1) and I saw that since march 30 there are new rpms of vlc with live555 included. I tested and it works again.

[Sébastien Escudier]

nice