[Live-devel] Compatibility between LiveMedia and RealPlayer RTSP implementations

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi everybody,

Given the very optimistic answers I got when inquiring about RTSP support in 
Windows Media Player, I decided to give RealPlayer a try.

Things were not better at the start (RealPlayer gave me a nice but meaningless 
error message), but I was more optimistic, as the debug trace on the server 
showed that OPTIONS, DESCRIBE and SETUP commands succeeded.

I started to investigate, and found out a problem with the SETUP command. It 
seems that RealPlayer asks for a unicast stream even when it is supposed to 
ask for multicast. The server returns a unicast transport description, and 
RealPlayer fails, complaining about ther server not supporting multicast. I 
sent a bug report to RealMedia and I'm waiting for an answer.

I then turned off multicast support in RealPlayer and decided to try with 
unicast. It turned out that RealPlayer needs the RTP-Info header in the PLAY 
response. A tried a Quick And Dirty(TM) hack by adding a dummy RTP-Info 
header with empty values for url, seq and rtptime, and suprise! it worked.

Well, it worked once, but I can't get my MP3 test stream to play again. The 
error dialog doesn't popup anymore, so I assume I need to feed RealPlayer 
with real values for url, seq and rtptime (seq might be the only one that is 
really needed).

The problem I have is that the seq and url values are not available in 
RTSPServer::RTSPClientSession::handleCmd_PLAY, so I'll have to refactor the 
class a bit. Does anyone have any advice about that ? I was also wondering 
why the std::string class isn't used anywhere. Are there coding rules for the 
LiveMedia library that I should adhere to ?

Thanks in advance for all the help you can provide.

Laurent Pinchart


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