How to stream RTSP live video in Firefox and Chrome now that the VLC plugin is not supported anymore?

Question

Now that the NPAPI that the VLC plugin uses is being discontinued in Firefox and that Google Chrome has discontinued the NPAPI for long is there any solution to stream RTSP live video inside these browsers?

Naxos

Not an answer but maybe worth a shot: Looking into VLC's livehttp module which enables you to segment streams and deliver them through html5 video. In this post I explain the general setup: https://mcmap.net/q/832212/-vlc-record-webcam-and-stream-to-chrome-linux the part on segmenting can be interchanged with VLC's livehttp module. Maybe this leads you somewhere. It is possible however the codecs and (in)compatibilities will be a pain to handle. – Colostrum

Thanks for your input. Transcoding the RTSP streams to HTML5 video would solve the problem but introduces other issues that are unacceptable in some cases: - latency due to the transcoding operation and HTTP protocol used with HTML5 video is not compatible with Live video streams where you can control / move the cameras around - if you have a large set of video cameras and viewers the transcoding infrastructure becomes expensive - network optimizations used with RTSP, namely Multicast, will probably not be supported in these scenarios – Naxos

Check this answer https://mcmap.net/q/1918709/-how-to-stream-video-over-rtsp-protocol-for-live555-server-on-web-browser I hope this will help you. – Christophe

Possible duplicate of How to stream video over rtsp protocol for Live555 server on web browser – Wreckage

Answer 1

After a long time digging and following this topic I have came to interesting results. At this point the best option seems to be an RTSP proxy that changes RTSP in a way that makes it compatible with something supported by web browsers (WebRTC, etc.).

I have collected the following solutions:

• https://github.com/Streamedian/html5_rtsp_player RTSP - Proxy - JS Player (nodeJS)
• https://github.com/lulop-k/kurento-rtsp2webrtc RTSP - WebRTC Proxy - Browser (nodeJS)
• Others in nodeJS - https://www.pincer.io/npm/tags/rtsp
• https://wmspanel.com/
• https://easyrtc.com/
• https://mcmap.net/q/118314/-best-approach-to-real-time-http-streaming-to-html5-video-client-closed
• http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/Choosing-a-Video-Player-Features-and-Specs-for-the-Top-Five-94188.aspx
• Native browser Video Player with HTML5 Video tag + WebSocket RTSP proxy https://github.com/SpecForge/html5_rtsp_player/wiki/HTML5-RTSP-Player~

For the future I expect:

• Video Camera manufacturers will start to implement protocols like WebRTC and MPEGdash
• Web Browsers SHOULD implement RTSP but this is probably not going to happen

Naxos