[FFmpeg-user] Best media converter container for IPCam network streams

[Carl Zwanzig]

On 9/14/2023 3:33 AM, Giuseppe Modugno wrote:
> First question: could ffmpeg save the stream in a "raw" format as it is 
> received from RTSP, without too much problems? 
Probably...

> I don't need to play the 
> video continuously, only when I want. Only at that moment, I could use 
> ffmpeg to join segments and transcode to mp4. In this case the transcoding 
> is limited in time and only for short videos.

(Only need to transcode to mp4 if the player doesn't support the other 
codecs, otherwise it's an extra step; but see below.)

> Second question: is there another media container format that could be 
> better to use in my situation?

I prefer mkv for resiliency, but opinions differ on that. I also wouldn't 
think twice about transcoding as received and writing that to files; it'll 
save time and hassle in the future as you've normalized the format. Or, 
transcode only the ones that are "weird" to solve the container issue and 
leave the rest alone. (Pay attention to frame and audio sampling rates; 
there's no point in transcoding 8k/sec audio to 48k or to a high-bit-rate 
encoding if you can avoid it.)

What's the output storage? May want to trade off encoding overhead for 
storage size.

Later,

z!