rtsp-peek

Overview

A CLI-driven RTSP stream viewer written in C. Leverages FFmpeg for decoding and SDL2 for low-latency rendering. View multiple streams in a single vertical stack.

Features:

• Minimal dependencies (only FFmpeg and SDL2)
• Tested on Linux systems (Fedora)

Dependencies & Build

1. Install Dependencies

This project has been built and tested with the following system libraries:

• SDL2 >= 2.32.64
• FFmpeg:
  • libavcodec >= 61.19.101
  • libavformat >= 61.7.100
  • libavutil >= 59.39.100
  • libswscale >= 8.3.100

Other versions may work, but these are the versions that have been verified.

Note: Only development packages include the headers and pkg-config files required to build this project. Runtime packages alone are not sufficient.

Debian / Ubuntu:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config git \
    libsdl2-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev

Fedora:

sudo dnf install -y gcc make pkgconf-pkg-config git \
    SDL2-devel ffmpeg-devel

Check installed versions:

pkg-config --modversion sdl2
pkg-config --modversion libavcodec
pkg-config --modversion libavformat
pkg-config --modversion libavutil
pkg-config --modversion libswscale

2. Clone the Project

git clone https://github.com/pvalde/rtsp-peek
cd rtsp-peek

3. Build

# release
make BUILD_TYPE=release

# debug
make BUILD_TYPE=debug

4. Install (optional)

# Install release binary to ~/.local/bin (default)
make install

# Uninstall
make uninstall

# Specify a custom directory
make install DESTDIR=/usr/local

# Uninstall from custom directory
make uninstall DESTDIR=/usr/local

5. Run

# if installed
rtsp-peek 'rtsp://example.com/stream'

# from cloned dir
./bin/release/rtsp-peek 'rtsp://example.com/stream'

Usage

License

This program dynamically links against the following third-party libraries, provided by the user’s system:

• SDL2 - zlib license.
• FFmpeg (libavformat, libavcodec, libavutil, libswscale) - LGPL or GPL license.

No external library code is included in this repository.