retina/README.md

retina

High-level RTSP multimedia streaming library, in Rust. Good support for ONVIF RTSP/1.0 IP surveillance cameras, as needed by Moonfire NVR. Works around brokenness in cheap closed-source cameras.

Status: In production use in Moonfire NVR. Many missing features. Some breaking changes needed to clean up APIs (see #47.)

Progress:

• client support
  • basic authentication.
  • digest authentication.
  • RTP over TCP via RTSP interleaved channels.
  • RTP over UDP (experimental).
  • • re-order buffer. (Out-of-order packets are dropped now.)
  • RTSP/1.0.
  • RTSP/2.0.
  • SRTP.
  • ONVIF backchannel support (for sending audio).
  • ONVIF replay mode.
  • receiving RTCP Sender Reports (currently only uses the timestamp)
  • sending RTCP Receiver Reports
• server support
• I/O modes
  • async with tokio
  • async-std
  • synchronous with std only
• codec depacketization
  • video: H.264 (RFC 6184)
    • SVC
    • periodic infra refresh
    • multiple slices per picture
    • multiple SPS/PPS
    • interleaved mode
    • AAC output format
    • Annex B output format (#44)
  • audio
    • AAC
      • interleaving
    • RFC 3551 codecs: G.711, G.723, L8/L16
  • application: ONVIF metadata
• clean, stable API. (See #47.)
• quality errors
• • detailed error description text.
• • programmatically inspectable error type.
• good functional testing coverage. (Currently lightly / unevenly tested. Most depacketizers have no tests.)
• fuzz testing. (In progress.)
• benchmark

Help welcome!

Getting started

Try the mp4 example. It streams from an RTSP server to a .mp4 file until you hit ctrl-C.

$ cargo run --example client mp4 --url rtsp://ip.address.goes.here/ --username admin --password test out.mp4
...
^C

Example client

$ cargo run --example client <CMD>

Where CMD:

• info - Gets info about available streams and exits.
• mp4 - Writes RTSP streams to mp4 file; exit with Ctrl+C.
• onvif - Gets realtime onvif metadata if available; exit with Ctrl+C.

Acknowledgements

This builds on the whole Rust ecosystem. A couple folks have been especially helpful:

• Sebastian Dröge, author of rtsp-types
• David Holroyd, author of h264-reader

Why "retina"?

It's a working name. Other ideas welcome. I started by looking at dictionary words with the letters R, T, S, and P in order and picking out ones related to video:

$ egrep '^r.*t.*s.*p' /usr/share/dict/words'
retinoscope	close but too long, thus retina
retrospect	good name for an NVR, but I already picked Moonfire
rotascope	misspelling of "rotascope" (animation tool) or archaic name for "gyroscope"?

License

Your choice of MIT or Apache; see LICENSE-MIT.txt or LICENSE-APACHE, respectively.