Android Camera RTSP

This is my journey to bring a new life to my old Samsung S10 5G, which still functions perfectly fine. You can read the full blog here.

I know there're still works to do, especially the battery part, or my house will end up in fire. But that's another day story.

Features

• Record from Camera and Microphone.
• Encode with H265 + AAC.
• Host an RTSP Server + Stream over RTP/TCP (not support UDP due to quality reasons).
• A/V sync using RTCP Sender Report.
• Use foreground service to keep the application alive.
• No busy-waiting in any threads.
• Try my best not to allocate dynamic memory.

Pipeline

I decide to use the NDK API because Java API has memory leak (link).

How to build

Hardware: An Android device with API level 28+.

Software: Android Studio with latest NDK (but I think the version doesn't really matter).

Steps

Simply import the repo as an Android Studio project and run.

Configs

In app/src/main/cpp/includes/utils/Configs.h, the following configs are device-dependent:

• VIDEO_WIDTH
• VIDEO_HEIGHT
• VIDEO_DEFAULT_FRAME_RATE
• VIDEO_MIN_FRAME_RATE
• CAMERA_ID
• VIDEO_CODEC_PROFILE
• VIDEO_CODEC_LEVEL

You should use Android APIs (just ask ChatGPT to generate the code) to find which config is hardware-acceleration supported.

How to use

Android: Start the app -> Click "Start".

PC or any other devices: Use VLC/ffmpeg -> open stream rtsp://<Android-ip>:8554/stream.

Connections

I highly recommend using Tailscale to create a VPN between your devices. After that, you can use the Tailscale's IP to connect.

Result