rtsp instructions for gstreamer are outdated and not working

[fotisK69]

Hi,

I tried to follow the instructions that are linked in the help page of pikrellcam at chapter Architecture, see "rtsp live video setup instructions" but first they are outdated and second not at all working.

Setup:

• Raspberry pi Zero w + raspberry camera
• pikrellcam installed and up & running
• HTTP web page and stream working fine

root@raspberrypi:~# /root/gst-gateworks-apps/bin/gst-variable-rtsp-server -d 99 -p 8555 -m /stream.high -u "( tcpclientsrc port=3000 do-timestamp=true blocksize=262144 ! video/x-h264,stream-format=byte-stream,profile=high ! h264parse ! rtph264pay name=pay0 pt=96 )"
[1]:main:475 - set debug level to: 99
[1]:main:483 - set port to: 8555
[1]:main:479 - set mount point to: /stream.high
Usage: gst-variable-rtsp-server [OPTIONS]

Options:
 --help,            -? - This usage
 --version,         -v - Program Version: 1.4
 --debug,           -d - Debug Level (default: 0)
 --mount-point,     -m - What URI to mount (default: /stream)
 --port,            -p - Port to sink on (default: 9099)
 --steps,           -s - Steps to get to 'worst' quality (default: 5)
 --max-bitrate,     -b - Max bitrate cap, 0 == VBR (default: 10000)
 --min-bitrate,        - Min bitrate cap (default: 1)
 --msg-rate,        -r - Rate of messages displayed (default: 5s)

Examples:
 - Create RTSP server out of user created pipeline:
        gst-variable-rtsp-server "videotestsrc ! v4l2h264enc ! rtph264pay name=pay0 pt=96"

Please help with new updated instructions for using gstreamer with pikrellcam.

Thanks

[bintravel]

I had the same problem, was caused by newer version of gst-gateworks in my case. You could (temporarily) solve this i think by using 'git checkout 96970c9b2596258863b057002154a80651540c2a ' after cloning into gst-gateworks-apps

[troffasky]

If you omit the -u, then gst-variable-rtsp-server will run and accept connections. It doesn't actually work, however.
Doing a packet capture, I see:

GET /stream.high HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.1.25:8555
Accept: /
Accept-Language: en_GB
User-Agent: VLC/3.0.11.1 LibVLC/3.0.11.1
Range: bytes=0-

HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Server: GStreamer RTSP Server
Connection: close
Cache-Control: no-store
Pragma: no-cache
Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2021 22:34:18 GMT

Pikrellcam is listening on port 3000 and if I netcat to it I get a flood of data, so it's not an issue with pikrellcam per se.

[troffasky]

Some slight progress here. Adding host=127.0.0.1 to the pipeline actually gets some video flowing! I think this might have been alluded to in a forum post about disabling IPv6. gst-variable-rtsp-server presumably tries localhost by default and localhost here is ::1. Unlike every other service, pikrellcam is only listening on IPv4, so it doesn't work, hence the 503.
That's the end of the good news, however. I get about 3-4s of video and then gst-variable-rtsp-server segfaults.