RTSP

The Real Time Streaming Protocol was developed by Progressive Networks, Netscape Communications and Columbia University. RTSP provides "VCR-style" control functionality such as pause, fast forward, reverse, and absolute positioning.

In the words of the authors, "The Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) establishes and controls either a single or several time-synchronized streams of continuous media such as audio or video...In other words, RTSP acts a ``network remote control for multimedia servers."

Connecting: The client is initially supplied with an RTSP URL, on the form:

rtsp://server.address:port/object.sdp

RTSP is an application-level protocol for control over the delivery of data with real-time properties. RTSP provides an extensible framework to enable controlled, on-demand delivery of real-time data, such as audio and video. Sources of data can include both live data feeds and stored clips. This protocol is intended to control multiple data delivery sessions, provide a means for choosing delivery channels such as UDP, multicast UDP and TCP, and provide a means for choosing delivery mechanisms based upon RTP.

RTSP is a text based protocol and uses the ISO 10646 character set in UTF-8 encoding. Lines are terminated by CRLF, but receivers should be prepared to also interpret CR and LF by themselves as line terminators.

Radio station and online commercial streaming using embedded RTSP embedded in the web site can be directly received with software such as VLC by doing a little RTSP Streaming Radio Address Hacking involving getting the stream address resource from the HTML source to which it is embedded.

CCTV Software and DVR systems capable of receiving streaming video from remote IP cameras typically do so using RTSP. ZoneMinder CCTV Camera Monitoring Software can monitor IP cameras via RTSP streaming protocol. ONVIF compliant CCTV cameras offer RTSP streaming.