Posted on Mar 5, 2021

How to stream RTSP to React using ExpressJS

#react #express #ffmpeg #axios

Hi, I'm back. I will be showing you how to stream RTSP video input to your React frontend.

RTSP video is generally from your ip camera but it is a type of video format. I struggled with doing this whole project but I have come up with a stable enough project to help you out, if you need any. Also, I'd say the solutions on the web are really all over the place.

I definitely struggled because I didn't know the first thing about RTSP and streaming video.

I'll be using these frameworks/technologies:

You can find the full source code here. I will go over the basics of the code.

We are going to:

use axios to send a GET request to the backend
use ffmpeg to convert RTSP to files (.m3u8 and .ts files)
pipe/insert those files into a HLS(Http Live Streaming) server
send a response back to the frontend once the .m3u8 file has been created
show the video player using a state variable
actually play the video

Use ffmpeg to convert RTSP to files (`.m3u8` and `.ts` files)

The RTSP video format consists of 2 files. The .m3u8 file and the .ts files.

The .m3u8 file is like a directory of where the .ts files are. So the video player needs the .m3u8 file to actually ask for the rest of the .ts files.

The .ts files are segments of the video that has been cut. You can specify the length of each segment using ffmpeg.

This is what the .m3u8 file looks like.

Since both files are needed, our backend does accommodate for these two files, meaning two GET request paths.

Pipe/insert those files into a HLS(Http Live Streaming) server

This is where HLS(HTTP Live Streaming) comes in.

As you can see, there are 2 routes. getManifestStream and getSegmentStream.

getManifestStream serves the .m3u8 file while getSegmentStream serves .ts files.

This code checks to see if the files(.m3u8, .ts) are actually created and makes sure that they are ready to be served/streamed to the frontend.

Send a response back to the frontend

To check if the .m3u8 file has actually been created, I did a check.

fs.access("videos/output.m3u8", fs.constants.F_OK, (err) => {}

This is made in the .on('progress') block of the ffmpeg function which allows you to check on the progress of the file conversion.

If the file has indeed been created, do a res.sendStatus(200).

Show the video player using a state variable

In the frontend, we are at the response block of the axios.get("") function where we will set the state variable to true and ask React to re-render the video player into the DOM.

Actually play the video

The video will play automatically once the .m3u8 file has been loaded. However, as you can see, I set the muted property as such because for some reason (as seen on Stackoverflow), Chrome needed it to be set for the video to play automatically.

Again, it can be overwhelming, so you can find the full source code here.