Wpf – Play rtsp stream in WPF (or WinForms)

mediaelementrtspwinformswpf

Is there a way to play a rtsp:// stream in WPF (or alternatively WinForms)?

I have tried MediaElement and MediaUriElement and none of them worked. I have also read a lot about WMP being able to play rtsp (which should translate to MediaElement too) but in reality WMP doesn't play it on a Windows 7 x64. I have seen this but I am hoping that is not a definite answer.

Has this anything to do with the video codec being used?

VLC plays the rtsp stream just fine.

I am looking for either a WPF or WinForms component or an alternative solution.

Best Answer

Try Accord.Net (http://accord-framework.net/). It has a very simple interface and is available as a nuget package (Accord.Video.FFMPEG). It can be used to retrieve a Bitmap instance which can be used in WinForms/WPF. The downside is that it doesn't support Mono (not sure what platform you're targeting).

Example:

VideoFileReader reader = new VideoFileReader();
reader.Open("rtsp://192.168......");

while (true)
{
   Bitmap frame = reader.ReadVideoFrame();
   //Do whatever with the frame...
}

reader.Close();

Related Solutions

C# – How to play H.264 RTSP video in Windows 8 Metro C# XAML app

See the post here. You need to wrap your data in MPEG-4 Part 14 containers and then pass them into MediaElement.SetSource. It appears you can't do this just using the documented API. Here is the important information from the link:

We don't support RTP but rather the MPEG-4 Part 14 container format. You will need to write our own source to be able to parse the data a pass it directly to the Microsoft decoder. At this time we do not have any samples on how to write a custom source and have it loaded from your Metro style app. Unfortunately it is not possible to simply use the documentation to figure out how to do this. I have been talking with Stan and we are trying to figure out how and when we can make this information available. As soon as this information is available I will announce it on my blog http://blogs.msdn.com/mediasdkstuff/.

Here is a list of supported video formats.

There is also an example here of how to extend the media class which might have an example of how to do something similar to what you are asking.

There is a similar example here.

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"
5. This window is where you select the output. Change the dropdown from "File" to "RTSP" and click "Add"
6. Choose a port number and a path. I will leave the port as 8554 and set the path to "/Test"
7. Click "Next" then click "Stream" You should see the VLC player start running, but the video will not play.

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
2. enter "rtsp://127.0.0.1:8554/Test" as the network url.
3. Click play and it should begin streaming.

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);
axVLCPlugin1.Play();

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C# – How to play H.264 RTSP video in Windows 8 Metro C# XAML app

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

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