rtsp_image_transport

A ROS package that lets nodes publish and subscribe image topics over RTSP video streams, sending only a URL in-band instead of image data.

Made by Fraunhofer FKIE, Germany (checked on github.com/fkie (opens in a new tab)).

Licenses

Code: Apache-2.0 (opens in a new tab)
Read by Robotheca from LICENSE (opens in a new tab) (Apache-2.0) at commit d815a17 (opens in a new tab), on 16 Oct 2026.
Commercial use: Yes

The publisher sends a latched string message containing the URL of an RTSP stream server, from which the image data is served.
Subscribers listen for those URLs and automatically connect and reconnect to the stream location.
Intended for streaming live video to one or more users, with multicast support to save bandwidth for many viewers.
Compatible with many commercial IP cameras; the publish_rtsp_stream node can reuse an existing RTSP stream as an image topic.
Uses the Live555 library for RTSP and FFmpeg for video compression, with hardware acceleration for several codecs depending on FFmpeg version and hardware.
Not suitable for image data consumed by processing algorithms because of lossy compression, and rosbag2 cannot record its data usefully.

Written by Robotheca from the project's README (opens in a new tab) at commit d815a17.

Checked on GitHub on 16 Oct 2026.

No robot on Robotheca is linked to it yet. Links come from a robot's robot.yaml, from its dependency files read as text, or from Robotheca's editors.

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