[Live-devel] Any feedback on the "LIVE555 HLS Proxy"?

[Rod Payne]

I find the HLS Proxy very useful for my home automation, but it has a problem that I haven't fully resolved yet (more on this in #6).

1. I haven't come across a browser that doesn't work, including Safari on an unsupported iPad 2 (which makes for a cheap monitor).  Without the proxy, going straight to the RTSP camera from VLC, any interruption to the camera's stream would stop the playback.  With the proxy, it mostly continues on after the interruption.  (VLC will play either stream.)
2. I was running it on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with Raspbian Stretch Lite.
3. In my case, it was running on the home network and everything was behind the same firewall.
4. The cameras that I am using are Wyze Cam v2's with the RTSP firmware (which appear to run Live555 internally).  No problems.
5. The cameras generate an audio stream, so that would be a nice feature.
6. The problem that I ran into was that sometimes, maybe once per day, the segmentationCallback would stop getting called.  In the file system the last segment would continue to grow, so it seems that the camera is continuing to send the stream, but nothing gets through the proxy.  A few times this went on until running out of temp space.  

Other times it would start calling again, but the duration of the segment would be greater than OUR_HLS_REWIND_DURATION, causing it to delete segments to get under the maximum until it ran out of segments and exited at the "should not happen" exit on line 353.  I fixed the HLS Proxy side of this by maintaining a segment count as segments were added and removed.  The "while" at line 350 was updated to also check the count to hold on to a minimum number of segments.  (I set it to three to be friendly to the browsers, but really it only has to be one.)

FYI, I downloaded "live.2020.04.12.tar.gz", dated 4/12/2020 3:46. 

Thanks for making this code available.  Keep up the good work.

Rod Payne
Hobbyist   

-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Finlayson <finlayson at live555.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2020 4:13 AM
To: live555 Streaming Media - development & use <live-devel at us.live555.com>
Subject: [Live-devel] Any feedback on the "LIVE555 HLS Proxy"?

A few months ago I added a new application to the source code release: the “LIVE555 HLS Proxy”
	http://www.live555.com/hlsProxy/
which allows you to view a RTSP stream from web browsers.

To date, I haven’t received a lot of feedback on this application, which suggests that probably not many people have been using it.

If you have not found this application particularly useful, I’d be interested to hear why.  Some possibilities:
	1/ Your favorite web browser doesn’t support viewing HLS streams
	2/ You don’t have a web server running on your computer (and setting one up would be too much of a pain)
	3/ Your RTSP server (e.g., camera) is stuck behind a NAT and/or firewall, and you have no way to access the HLS segments from the external Internet
	4/ Your RTSP source (e.g., camera) doesn’t generate H.264 video.  (Currently, the “LIVE555 HLS Proxy” supports only H.264 video.)
	5/ Your RTSP source (e.g., camera) generates an audio stream as well as a video stream.  (Currently, the “LIVE555 HLS Proxy” will proxy only the video stream (which must be H.264)
	6/ Some other reason?


Ross Finlayson
Live Networks, Inc.
http://www.live555.com/