SmolRTSP

SmolRTSP is a simple RTSP 1.0 server library tailored for embedded devices, such as IP cameras. It supports both TCP and UDP, allows any payload format, and provides a convenient and flexible API.

Highlights

• Small. SmolRTSP is designed for use in embedded systems (e.g., IP cameras).
• Unopinionated. You can use SmolRTSP with bare POSIX sockets, libevent, or any other network framework.
• Zero-copy. SmolRTSP does not allocate or copy data while parsing.
• Battle-tested. SmolRTSP is used by Majestic, an IP camera streamer developed by OpenIPC.

Features

• Supported protocols:
  • RTSP 1.0 (RFC 2326)
  • RTP (RFC 3550)
  • RTP over TCP (interleaved binary data)
  • RTP over UDP
  • SDP (RFC 4566)
  • RTCP
• Supported RTP payload formats:
  • H.264 (RFC 6184)
  • H.265 (RFC 7798)

Installation

If you use CMake, the recommended way is FetchContent:

include(FetchContent)

FetchContent_Declare(
    smolrtsp
    URL https://github.com/OpenIPC/smolrtsp/archive/refs/tags/v1.2.3.tar.gz # v1.2.3
)

FetchContent_MakeAvailable(smolrtsp)

target_link_libraries(MyProject smolrtsp)

Options

Option	Description	Default
SMOLRTSP_SHARED	Build a shared library instead of static.	OFF
SMOLRTSP_FULL_MACRO_EXPANSION	Show full macro expansion backtraces (DANGEROUS: may impair diagnostics and slow down compilation).	OFF

Usage

A simple example server that streams H.264 video and G.711 Mu-Law audio can be found at examples/server.c.

Run it as follows:

$ mkdir examples/build
$ cd examples/build
$ cmake .. && cmake --build .
$ sudo ./server

Then open a new terminal window to start playing:

$ ffplay rtsp://localhost

Integration

SmolRTSP is agnostic to a network backend: you can run it atop of any network/event loop framework. Currently, we support the following integrations:

• OpenIPC/smolrtsp-libevent (libevent)

Feel free to extend this list with your own integration code.

Release procedure

1. Update the PROJECT_NUMBER field in Doxyfile.
2. Update CHANGELOG.md.
3. Release the project in GitHub Releases.