How do I get an RTSP stream to play in Mac OS X's Quartz Composer?

Question

Putting an rtsp:// stream URL into a Movie patch in Quartz Composer (QC) and rendering it onto a Billboard patch causes QC to hang. A number of commentators on the net have noted that QuickTime uses a different rendering path for streams than for local files, which seems to be the cause of this bug, but I can't find any suggested workarounds.

We want to be able to stream from an IP video camera generating MPEG-4 over RTSP into QC. The same stream URL in standalone QuickTime and VLC works fine.

Answer 1

Revisiting this with Mac OS X 10.6, and it works! Piping the same RTSP MPEG-4 stream into a Movie Importer patch now works fine in QC.

So, answer to question is: upgrade to 10.6.

Answer 2

I have seen this work before using a reference movie with the stream url instead of providing the stream url itself. Composer may still hang as QuickTime cannot know the dimensions, etc. of the moov until network playback starts, and that can cause a number of issues inside composer.