Video Streams; How To Stream Mpeg-4/H.264 - Axis M1054 User Manual

Video Streams

The network camera provides several image and video stream formats. Your requirements and the properties of your network
will determine the type you use.
The Live View page in the network camera provides access to H.264, Motion JPEG, and MPEG-4 video streams, and to the list
of available stream profiles. Other applications and clients can also access these video streams/images directly, without going
via the Live View page.
Note:
AXIS M1054 does not support MPEG-4.

How to stream MPEG-4/H.264

This video compression standard makes good use of bandwidth, and can provide high quality video streams at less than 1
Mbit/s.
Your viewing requirements and the properties of your network will determine which combination of protocols and methods to
use. The available options in AMC are:
Unicast RTP
RTP over RTSP
RTP over RTSP over
HTTP
Multicast RTP
AMC negotiates with the camera to determine the transport protocol to use in the order listed above. This order can be
changed and the options disabled, to suit specific requirements.
Important!
H.264, MPEG-4, and AAC are licensed technologies. The network camera includes one H.264 viewing client license;
and one MPEG-4 (AXIS M1054 excepted) viewing client license, and one audio client license (AXIS M1031-W and
AXIS M1054 only). Installing additional unlicensed copies of the clients is prohibited. To purchase additional licenses,
contact your Axis reseller.
This unicast method (RTP over UDP) should
be your first consideration for live unicast
video, especially when it is important to
always have an up-to-date video stream,
even if some images are dropped.
This unicast method (RTP tunneled over
RTSP) is useful as it is relatively simple to
configure firewalls to allow RTSP traffic.
This unicast method can be used to traverse
firewalls. Firewalls are commonly configured
to allow the HTTP protocol, thus allowing
RTP to be tunneled.
This method (RTP over UDP) should be used for live multicast video. The video stream is always
up-to-date, even if some images are dropped.
Multicasting provides the most efficient usage of bandwidth when there are large numbers of cli-
ents viewing simultaneously. A multicast broadcast cannot however, pass a network router unless
the router is configured to allow this. It is not possible to multicast over the Internet, for example.
Note also that all multicast viewers count as one unicast viewer in the maximum total of 20
simultaneous connections.
AXIS M10 Series - Video Streams
Unicasting is used for video-on-demand broadcasting,
so that there is no video traffic on the network until a
client connects and requests the stream.
Note that there is a maximum of 20 simultaneous uni-
cast connections.
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