ffmpeg can play video but not a stream containing the same data

Question

This is my first time encountering video codecs/video streaming.

I am receiving raw h.264 packets over TCP. When I connect to the socket, listen to it and simply save the received data to a file, I am able to play it back using

ffplay data.h264

However, when I try to directly play it from the stream without saving it, using

ffplay tcp://addr:port

all I get is the error

Invalid data found when processing input

Why is that?

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '17 at 05:06

1

Specify the format: ffplay -f h264 tcp://addr:port

answered May 18 '17 at 05:06

Gyan

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I tried it with `ffplay -vcodec h264 tcp://addr:port` but maybe that was the wrong parameter. I'll check later. Thanks for now! – Robbsen May 18 '17 at 10:32
That sets the decoder but not the demuxer. Mine sets the latter and the decoder is autoselected. – Gyan May 18 '17 at 10:34
I tried `ffplay -f h264 -codec:v h264 -analyzeduration 2147483647 -probesize 2147483647 tcp://addr:port` still without any luck – Robbsen May 21 '17 at 09:01
Can you share the URL? – Gyan May 21 '17 at 12:04
Do you mean the IP address? Sure, it's simply `127.0.0.1:8889` – Robbsen May 21 '17 at 12:46

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 21 '17 at 15:33

1

Alright I found another way to display the video stream.

ffplay -f h264 -codec:v h264 tcp://addr:port?listen

The ?listen parameter makes it so ffplay creates its own tcp server. All I do now is send the data to the specified address.

answered May 21 '17 at 15:33

Robbsen

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ffmpeg can play video but not a stream containing the same data

2 Answers2