Capturing h.264 stream from camera with Gstreamer

gstreamer, h.264, v4l2

Solution

Is gstreamer mandatory for your needs? I also have lots of problems with the Logitech C920 in H264 mode and gstreamer. But I managed to use VLC as a RTSP server to use the C920 with H264:

$ cvlc -v v4l2:///dev/video0:chroma="H264":width=1024:height=570:fps=30 \
       --sout="#rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8554/live}"

Then I can connect with another VLC to the URI rtsp://localhost:8554/live

If GStreamer is mandatory for you, I only managed to use it with a capture utility that you can find here: https://github.com/csete/bonecam - directory "capture"

You have to compile it, but if you have some programming skills it shoud be very easy as there is only one C file and a script to help. Just pass "host" as a parameter to the script :

# Get the bonecam/capture content or git clone the directory, and then
$ cd bonecam/capture
$ ./build host

You can use the "capture" utility with something like that :

$ v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --set-fmt-video=width=1024,height=570,pixelformat=1
$ v4l2-ctl -d /dev/video0 --set-parm=30
$ ./bonecam/capture/capture -d /dev/video0 -c 100000 -o | \
      gst-launch -e filesrc location=/dev/fd/0 ! legacyh264parse ! rtph264pay ! udpsink host=10.0.0.42 port=5000

If you do not like to specify the number of frame to get ("-c" parameter with "capture"), there is a fork to this utility that you can find here: https://github.com/DeLaGuardo/bonecam

I know there is a plugin categorized as "bad", called uvch264 for gstreamer 0.10, that should work with the C920. But I do not know for gstreamer 1.0, and I could not test it.

UPD:

Don't forget to add `--rtsp-timeout=-1` to `cvlc` command line like

$ cvlc -v v4l2:///dev/video0:chroma="H264":width=1024:height=570:fps=30 \
       --sout="#rtp{sdp=rtsp://:8554/live}" --rtsp-timeout=-1

Without this option streaming only lasts for 60 seconds by default.

Problem

Original source