Looping Canned Video For Demos

Here’s a few simple(?) steps to stream pre-recorded video into your VMS.

First you need to install an RTMP server that can do RTMP to RTSP conversion. You can use Evostream, Wowza or possibly Nimblestreamer.  Nginx-rtmp won’t work as it does not support RTSP output.

Then get FFMpeg (windows users can get it here).

Find or create the canned video that you want to use, and store it somewhere accessible.

In this example, I have used a file called R1.mp4 and my RTMP server (Evostream) is located at 192.168.0.109. The command used is this:

ffmpeg -re -stream_loop -1 -i e:\downloads\r1.mp4 -c copy -fflags +genpts -f flv rtmp://192.168.0.109/live/r1

Once this is streaming (and you can verify using VLC and opening the RTMP url you provided), you can go to your VMS and add a generic RTSP camera.

For Evostream, the RTSP output is on a different port, and has a slightly different format, so in the recorder I add:

rtsp://192.168.0.109:5544/r1

Other RTMP servers may have a slightly different transform of the URL, so check the manual.

I now have a video looping into the VMS and I can run tests and benchmarks on the exact same feed w/o needing an IP camera.