Viewing an mjpeg stream with mplayer

Introduction

Firefox and Co uses much CPU Power on my X-Windows.

I search for an other client and found a solution with mplayer to view an MJPEG Stream in real-time.

 mkfifo a.mjpeg wget -O a.mjpeg http://localhost:8081 2>/dev/null & mplayer -cache 32 -demuxer 35 a.mjpeg 

Because mplayer doesn't know anything from handling http streaming wget is used.

A fifo is filled only with mjpeg by wget.

Mplayer reads from this fifo and uses the mjpeg demuxer (35) to view the stream.

-- PeterHolik - 18 Jul 2005

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That is a wonderful idea. I will think about where in the official Motion Guide I should put this little gold piece of information.

-- KennethLavrsen - 18 Jul 2005

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The above suggestion did not work for me. What works however is

mplayer -demuxer lavf http://localhost:8081/stream.mjpg

Note that the stream.mjpg part is important, without it you will get LAVF_check: no clue about this gibberish! nonsense from libavformat.

Adding MPEG or AVI streaming would still be a good idea though, as I believe it will help save bandwidth.

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If your camera does not have a sream location that ends with .mjpg then you can still fool mplayer into thinking is does by attaching a fake get variable at the end of the URL like this :

" mplayer -demuxer lavf http://localhost:8081/?video_name=stream.mjpg "

-- BradMrumlinski - 24 May 2011

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FFplay from FFmpeg works as well and has many options, *mjpeg format needs to be forced. :

ffplay -f mjpeg -probesize 32 -i http://localhost:8081

The full manual is over at http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffplay.html

*Credit: http://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/libav-user/2013-May/004557.html

--Kelsie.Flynn - 2 Dec 2013

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