Tunneling live RTSP video on a port forwarded camera

There are some times where you may need to view live video on an IQeye H.264 camera that is behind a firewall.

Normally, the RTSP stream is accessible on port 554, which is fine if you have the ability to provision a public IP for each of your cameras.

But if you are behind a NAT, then the camera will have a port forwarding like port 8080 on the outside. How do you stream video if you cannot get to port 554 on the inside?

Use the RTSP over HTTP function in VLC!

First, configure VLC

1. Go to Tools -> Preferences
2. Click on the All radio button at the bottom
3. Search for RTSP
4. Select "Tunnel RTSP and RTP over HTTP"
5. Set the HTTP tunnel port to the port forwarded port of your IQeye camera (let's use 8080 in this case)

Open a Network Stream

Use the path /rtsp/now.mp4 instead of just /now.mp4.

1. Media-> Open Network Stream
2. Enter 'rtsp://<ip_of_your_camera>:8080/rtsp/now.mp4' as the address (8080 is the example we are using)
3. Click Play

Voila!