Axis Communications AXIS 214 PTZ - Manual (Page 17)

17 AXIS 214 PTZ - Video and Audio Streams
How to stream MPEG-4
Deciding on the combination of protocols and methods to use depends on your viewing
requirements, and on the properties of your network. Setting the preferred method(s) is
done in the control applet for AMC, which is found in the Windows Control Panel. When
this has been set, AMC will test all the selected methods in the specified order, until the
first functioning one is found.
RTP+RTSP
This method (actually RTP over UDP and RTSP over TCP) should be your first consideration
for live video, especially when it is important to always have an up-to-date video stream,
even if some images do get dropped. This can be configured as multicast or unicast.
Multicasting provides the most efficient usage of bandwidth, especially when there are
large numbers of clients viewing simultaneously. Note however, that a multicast broadcast
cannot pass a network router unless the router is configured to allow this. It is thus not
possible to multicast over e.g. the Internet.
Unicasting should be used for video-on-demand broadcasting, so that there is no video
traffic on the network until a client connects and requests the stream. However, as more
and more unicast clients connect, the traffic on the network will increase and may cause
congestion. Although there is a maximum of 20 unicast viewers, note that all multicast
users combined count as 1 unicast viewer.
RTP/RTSP
This unicast method is RTP tunneled over RTSP. This can be used to exploit the fact that it
is relatively simple to configure firewalls to allow RTSP traffic.
RTP/RTSP/HTTP or RTP/RTSP/HTTPS
These two methods can also be used to traverse firewalls. Firewalls are commonly
configured to allow the HTTP protocol, thus allowing RTP to be tunneled.
AXIS Media Control
The recommended method of accessing live video (MPEG-4 and/or Motion JPEG) and
audio from the AXIS 214 PTZ is to use the AXIS Media Control (AMC) in Microsoft
Internet Explorer in Windows. This ActiveX component is automatically installed on first
use, after which it can be configured by opening the AMC Control Panel applet from the
Windows Control Panel. Alternatively, right-click the video image in Internet Explorer.