Camera

How to receive a feed from a CCTV camera in RTMP [Part 2]

Oct 11, 2022

The main idea of this user case and is that with Callaba Cloud you can receive and process (broadcast, record, re-stream) input streams directly from CCTV cameras. That might be useful if you plan to create any kind of automated workflow for your surveillance camera feeds.

This is a second example of how you can do a similar set up.
First article : How to transform UDP feed from a CCTV camera into RTMP [Part 1]

Before you begin, make sure that you have :

Access to the web interface of the video camera.
In our example we are using UNV DC12V PoE IP camera.

2. Callaba Cloud Live Streaming: a streaming platform that can receive camera streams and perform all kinds of tasks with them.
Subscribing to Callaba Cloud will take no more than 5 minutes.
Read our step-by-step manual: How to Launch Callaba Cloud.

Creating an RTMP Server

0. Log into Callaba Cloud Live Streaming dashboard

To open it, go to http://YOUR PUBLIC IPV4.

By default, the dashboard address is the Public IPv4 address of your Amazon Web Services instance.

Login : admin
Password : your unique Instance ID

If you are having difficulties with this step, check out our step-by-step manual: How to launch Callaba Cloud Live Streaming.

Okay, now let’s begin

Go to RTMP Servers section
Click “Add New”
Name your RTMP Server
Change other settings if needed
Click “Save”

3. Now we’ll need to grab RTMP Player URL from the RTMP Player we’ve just created.

Click “Info” (the (i) icon)

Copy the RTMP Player URL

4. Now let’s venture into our camera web interface.
In our example we are using UNV DC12V PoE IP camera.

You camera settings and general interface might look a little different.
But you need to create a new connection / media stream and specify your destination.

In your camera settings, add new Media Stream.
IP Address : paste RTMP Player URL we’ve just grabbed
Protocol : specify RTMP protocol

Great! Now our RTMP stream is being sent to our RTMP server.

Back to Callaba Cloud Dashboard.

The stream is now coming to the RTMP server — that means that we can now do a bunch of stuff with the stream. We can record it. Or we can set up a re-stream or a router and send the stream somewhere else, maybe also transcode it. We can do a lot of different things, but for the sake of this example we are going to create a web player to watch our stream.

5. Go to Web Players section

Click “Add New”

In the form that opens :

Name your Player

Input type : select RTMP server

RTMP Server : select your newly created RTMP server from the list

RTMP stream key : Copy the stream key from the RTMP Server you’ve created

Click “Save”