Extract frames as images from an RTMP stream in real-time

Question

I am streaming short videos (4 or 5 seconds) encoded in H264 at 15 fps in VGA quality from different clients to a server using RTMP which produced an FLV file. I need to analyse the frames from the video as images as soon as possible so I need the frames to be written as PNG images as they are received.

Currently I use Wowza to receive the streams and I have tried using the transcoder API to access the individual frames and write them to PNGs. This partially works but there is about a second delay before the transcoder starts processing and when the stream ends Wowza flushes its buffers causing the last second not to get transcoded meaning I can lose the last 25% of the video frames. I have tried to find a workaround but Wowza say that it is not possible to prevent the buffer getting flushed. It is also not the ideal solution because there is a 1 second delay before I start getting frames and I have to re-encode the video when using the transcoder which is computationally expensive and unnecessarily for my needs.

I have also tried piping a video in real-time to FFmpeg and getting it to produce the PNG images but unfortunately it waits until it receives the entire video before producing the PNG frames.

How can I extract all of the frames from the stream as close to real-time as possible? I don’t mind what language or technology is used as long as it can run on a Linux server. I would be happy to use FFmpeg if I can find a way to get it to write the images while it is still receiving the video or even Wowza if I can find a way not to lose frames and not to re-encode.

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

Answer 1

I finally found a way to do this with FFmpeg. The trick was to disable audio, use a different flv meta data analyser and to reduce the duration that FFmpeg waits for before processing. My FFmpeg command now starts like this:

ffmpeg -an -flv_metadata 1 -analyzeduration 1 ...

This starts producing frames within a second of receiving an input from a pipe so writes the streamed frames pretty close to real-time.

Answer 2

Since you linked this question from the red5 user list, I'll add my two cents. You may certainly grab the video frames on the server side, but the issue you'll run into is transcoding from h.264 into PNG. The easiest was would be to use ffmpeg / avconv after getting the VideoData object. Here is a post that gives some details about getting the VideoData: http://red5.5842.n7.nabble.com/Snapshot-Image-from-VideoData-td44603.html Another option is on the player side using one of Dan Rossi's FlowPlayer plugins: http://flowplayer.electroteque.org/snapshot