RTSP cameras and servers

Most IP cameras expose their video stream by using a RTSP server that is embedded into the camera itself. In particular, cameras that are compliant with ONVIF profile S or T meet this requirement. You can use MediaMTX to connect to one or several existing RTSP servers and read their media streams:

paths:
  proxied:
    # Use rtsp:// for plain RTSP and rtsps:// for encrypted RTSP.
    source: rtsp://user:pass@host:port/path
    # If the source is RTSPS and the source TLS certificate is self-signed
    # or invalid, you can provide the fingerprint of the certificate in order to
    # validate it anyway. It can be obtained by running:
    # openssl s_client -connect source_ip:source_port </dev/null 2>/dev/null | sed -n '/BEGIN/,/END/p' > server.crt
    # openssl x509 -in server.crt -noout -fingerprint -sha256 | cut -d "=" -f2 | tr -d ':'
    sourceFingerprint:

If username or password contain special characters (like ?, :, etc), they need to be url-encoded.

Some cameras require a username but an empty password. In this case, keep the colon after the username (rtsp://user:@host:port/path): a username without a colon (rtsp://user@host:port/path) is treated as a missing password and rejected.

The resulting stream will be available on path /proxied.

It is possible to tune the connection by using several additional parameters, that are listed in the configuration file.

Advanced RTSP features and settings are described in RTSP-specific features.

MPEG-TS inside RTSP

Some RTSP servers expose a single MPEG-TS (MP2T) track instead of elementary H.264 / H.265. In that case MediaMTX would keep tracks: ["MPEG-TS"] and HLS / WebRTC would not attach. Enable rtspDemuxMpegts on the path (same flag as RTSP publishers):

paths:
  proxied:
    source: rtsp://user:pass@host:port/path
    rtspTransport: tcp
    rtspDemuxMpegts: true