asp.net core live mp4 streaming

Question

Prologue:

I have a hikvision ipcamera that streams raw h264 from a rtsp:// url, I need to play this live feed in the browser.

I managed to get a basic RTSP->ffmpeg-> (faststart) mp4 pipeline working and I can play the video when saved to a file.

I don't understand how to make my controller action "streamable".

I've tried various approaches like writing to Response.Body, Transfer-Encoding: chunked but nothing seems to work. Here is the basic code:

public IActionResult Play5(){    
      var ms = new MemoryStream();
      var muxer = new RTSPToMp4(ms);
      Task.Run(() => muxer.Stream());
      return new FileStreamResult(ms, "video/mp4");
}

The memory stream contains the live feed but the response is empty here is the request\response from chrome:

Request

method: GET
:path: /api/stream/play5
:scheme: https
accept: */*
accept-encoding: identity;q=1, *;q=0
accept-language: it-IT,it;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7
cache-control: no-cache
pragma: no-cache
range: bytes=0-
referer: https://localhost:5001/Stream
sec-fetch-dest: video
sec-fetch-mode: no-cors
sec-fetch-site: same-origin
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.121 Safari/537.36

Response

content-length: 0
content-type: video/mp4
date: Thu, 08 Oct 2020 14:31:06 GMT
server: Kestrel
status: 200

Am I missing something?

VC.One VC.One · Accepted Answer · 2020-10-08T21:34:46

MP4 cannot be live streamed.

Fastest solution is that you should keep the H.264 format as is (not contained inside some MP4 file) and just use any JavaScript based H.264 decoder.

asp.net core live mp4 streaming

1 Answers