Force FFMPEG to use TCP protocol when reading a RTSP Stream

tcp ffmpeg rtsp
gary_star picture gary_star · Apr 23, 2014 · Viewed 35.8k times · Source

I'm running ffmpeg (Windows 7, 64bit) from command line to get a frame from a RTSP stream (second channel from my DVR):

ffmpeg  -i "rtsp://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:554/user=xxxx&password=xxxx&channel=2&stream=0.sdp" -rtsp_transport tcp -y video.jpg

After running, it waits for about 10 seconds and then i get:

[rtsp @ 026fd840] UDP timeout, retrying with TCP

After another long wait (2 minutes or so), i get:

[rtsp @ 028dd840] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: h264): unspecified size

I read somewhere that I have to force using TCP, because changing from UDP to TCP will not work.

I don't understand why -rtsp_transport tcp is not working.

I'm using ffmpeg version N-62509-g97751e1 built on Apr 17 2014 22:01:31 with gcc 4.8.2 (GCC).

Please help me. Thank you.

Answer

Fotios Basagiannis picture Fotios Basagiannis · Apr 25, 2014

Just put the -rtsp_transport tcp right after ffmpeg to apply it on the input stream. Like this:

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -i "rtsp://x.x.x.x:554/user=x&password=x&channel=2&stream=0.sdp" -y video.jpg

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