Port Forwarded RTSP Streams Not Connecting as OBS Source

[RTCWildlifeCams]

Hello,

I install and maintain publicly accessible streaming wildlife webcams and I am looking to reduce the onsite hardware footprint of a few new sites I'm spinning up. I would like to port forward the RTSP streams from some small sites to a centralized OBS server instead of having each site with its own dedicated computer running OBS connected to YouTube RTMP service. I believe this is a decent high level idea as I can scale the CPU, RAM, and GPU capacity in one location. Anyone run more the 2 or 3 instances of OBS on a high end desktop? RTX3080 standing by ;) I already know many of the downsides to doing this but just trying to see the feasibility from an OBS standpoint. For now I'm ignoring the security/privacy, bandwidth, and reliability issues this architecture introduces.

Only issue I'm running into while testing this so far is I cannot get OBS to pull up the port forwarded RTSP stream as a media source. I've got all of the stream URL correct since it works just fine when pulling it up with VLC on the same Win 10 computer. I have played with the windows firewall setting as discussed in another thread and those look good (VLC has no problem playing it and they are set the same). Is this an OBS thing that it doesn't like public IPs or the port numbers in the RTSP URL?

I've tried many combinations of different computers at other sites running OBS servers and even different port forwarded RTSP streams from some other site's cameras that record to a Blue Iris server and it never seems to work with the public IP in the URL.

Both ways work in VLC, Neither work in OBS:
rtsp://UN:PW@107.XXX.XXX.XXX:8554/av0_0
rtsp://107.XXX.XXX.XXX:8554/av0_0

 

[RTCWildlifeCams]

Another Point: When I switch the same PC back to the same network as the camera and use the private IP URL as the source it comes up just fine in OBS so I don't think it's and OBS graphics card recognition issue.

 

[erikskyten]

This is a few months old, but did you get it working?

I have the same problem. OBS works 100% when I connect with my local IP. But, when I connect with my public IP and port forward from internet to my camera server, it does not connect.

I see in the log there is this:

MP: Failed to open media: 'rtsp://xxx:yyy@mydomain:554/streaming/channels/101'

I know my port forwarding is working because I use it in VLC and on my iPhone and other Windows computers outside my home

I disabled my firewall and firewall is not an issue, besides it works for other applications just fine

I do not see anywhere in the documentation that you cannot stream from a public IP address...

Erik

 

[R1CH]

RTSP requires open ports on both the server and the client. It's a pretty useless protocol outside of LAN due to NAT everywhere.

 

[Coetzrerp]

This is a few months old, but did you get it working?

I have the same problem. OBS works 100% when I connect with my local IP. But, when I connect with my public IP and port forward from internet to my camera server, it does not connect.

I see in the log there is this:

MP: Failed to open media: 'rtsp://xxx:yyy@mydomain:554/streaming/channels/101'

I know my port forwarding is working because I use it in VLC and on my iPhone and other Windows computers outside my home

I disabled my firewall and firewall is not an issue, besides it works for other applications just fine

I do not see anywhere in the documentation that you cannot stream from a public IP address...

Erik

I was struggling with the same issue for days, but got around it by instead of choosing "Media Source" when adding RTSP feed, I chose "VLC Video Source", when you add a playlist, you choose path/url and enter the RTSP Feed URL: rtsp://user:pass@public_IP:port/stream1

Works perfectly now.