How to run H.264 through RTSP on WMP

h.264ms-media-foundationrtspwindows 7windows-media-player

I've heard that Windows Media Player has problems trying to play H.264 video over RTSP. I've just made a fresh install of Windows 7, which claims to support H.264 natively (and it actually did ok playing the simpsons sample from http://www.h264info.com/clips.html). But when I try to view this same file streamed through RTSP, it complains and doesn't play the video saying:

"Windows Media Player cannot play the file. One or more codecs required to play the file could not be found."

How can it be complaining about a codec which was perfectly capable of decoding this same file?

I'm using Unreal Media Server to stream this file and connecting from the same computer.

What one could do to make WMP on Win 7 play H264 over RTSP?

Best Answer

While there is support for RTSP in Media Foundation, I don't think H.264 RTP Payload is supported.

See http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/da/mediafoundationdevelopment/thread/4ac87f5f-b8c5-471a-a424-55c0fff04eac

Another issue is that the RTSP source only supports a small number of RTP payload formats -- ASF, MP3, and LPCM. If your camera streams MPEG4, MJPEG, or some other format, the RTSP source will not handle it.

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C# – Play RTSP through VLC in VS2010 on 64bit machine

Try adding "file:///" before the filepath. That should get it to play from a file.

Once that works, you can use VLC to create an RTSP stream.
1. in VLC, go to Media->stream
2. Under the File tab, click "Add" and select a video you wish to stream.
3. At the bottom, there is a button with a dropdown. Select stream and then click the button.
4. A window will pop up showing the source file path. Click "Next"
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If you want to test to make sure the stream is working properly you can open another instance of vlc to view the stream.
1. Go to Media->Open Network Stream
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After verifying that the stream is running, close the second instance of VLC and in your application, set those two lines of code to be:

axVLCPlugin1.addTarget("rtsp://172.16.10.50:8554/Test", null, VLCPlaylistMode.VLCPlayListReplaceAndGo, 0);
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Best Answer

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