Video Streams; How To Stream Mpeg-4/H.264 - Axis M3011 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.

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.
Deciding the combination of protocols and methods to use depends on your viewing requirements, and on the properties of
your network. 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 and MPEG-4 are licensed technologies. The network camera includes one viewing client license for each tech-
nology. Installing additional unlicensed copies of the viewing client is prohibited. To purchase additional licenses, con-
tact 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 M3011 - Video Streams
Unicasting is used for video streaming, so that there is
no video traffic on the network until a client connects
and requests the stream.
Note that there are a maximum of 20 simultaneous
unicast connections.
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