Darwin Streaming Server doesn't gives content

Question

I have problems with Darwin Streaming server 5.5.5 on Debian. When i'm trying to open some stream, for ex. rtsp://sample.com/sample_100kbit.mp4 player reports it can't load stream and breaks connection. "Access History" section reports file was requested, so, at least initial connection is working, but nothing more.

What can be wrong and what to check?

Answer 1

What client are you using to stream the file? If you are using VLC, you can get additional messages information that may help answer the problem. The other thing is to check whether the client has received any packets this should be in the access history log.

Possible problems include:

• UDP packets blocked: does the client only attempt to create a UDP connection; is there a NAT or firewall between server and client that may be blocking this transport?
• Improperly encoded file: what codecs were used to encode the audio and video; what options? E.g. Some clients may support h.264, however, they may only support baseline profile and not main profile.

Additional things that you can attempt to continue troubleshooting:

• Look at the packets/sent received counts in the server logs.
• Download live555's RTSP library that includes the openRTSP binary (you should be able to compile this on a Debian system). It gives you an alternate client that can print very verbose output to understand if you have any server-side problems.
• Use Telnet and send a DESCRIBE request to the server by hand and look at the response to see that it looks acceptable.
• Take a packet capture on the outgoing interface of your darwin streaming server. This will allow you to see what response was sent from the server and whether all packets are getting sent. If you can also take a packet capture on the client device, you can confirm whether UDP packets are getting received.

Answer 2

If there is NAT between DSS and the client, and the client is requesting content via UDP transport, the client could not get the content since DSS doesn't support NAT traversal.

Possible solutions: 1. Use TCP transport, which is not affected by NAT. 2. You can also add NAT support in DSS, not complex.