RTP Video Sender

Overview

The RTP Video Sender is a ROS1 Noetic package designed for video streaming with ffmpeg.

It captures local video devices (V4L2) and utilizes FFmpeg inside a managed ROS launch environment to encode the stream into H.264 via RTP/UDP. The package supports multiple cameras simultaneously.

Works perfectly with our rtp receiver package.

Requirements

Ensure FFmpeg with libx264 encoding support is installed on your Debian/Ubuntu system:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra

The launch file relies on the standard ROS nodelet package to manage the standalone execution of external processes:

sudo apt install ros-noetic-nodelet

Installation

Clone the repository into your Catkin workspace on the robot:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone git@github.com:CJT-Robotics/rtp_sender.git

Build the workspace:

cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin_make

Source your workspace:

source devel/setup.bash

Usage

Start the ROS Master.

Launch the streaming pipeline using the default configuration:

roslaunch rtp_sender test.launch

Configuration

Multi-Camera Setup

You can stream from multiple hardware devices simultaneously by configuring the camera blocks inside the test.launch file, assigning unique UDP ports and video devices.

Parameters

Parameter	Default	Description
receiver_ip	127.0.0.1	IP address of the device receiving the stream
cam1_dev	/dev/video0	V4L2 video device path for Camera 1
cam1_port	5000	Target UDP port for the Camera 1 RTP stream
cam1_fps	20	Framerate
cam1_preset	good	Network quality preset (good or poor)

Network Quality Presets

The launch file includes predefined bitrate limits:

good (Standard Wi-Fi)

• Target bitrate: 750k
• Maximum bitrate: 1M
• Buffer size: 500k

poor (Degraded / Long-range Wi-Fi)

• Target bitrate: 350k
• Maximum bitrate: 500k
• Buffer size: 250k

Troubleshooting