Does trackstudio support streaming videoframe frrom laptop' camera using mediamtx+ffmpeg

[cmpolik]

Hello!
I've got laptops with cameras and a remote machine with a strong GPU. So my task is to deploy "trackstudio" on the remote machine. For that, I did these steps.

1. I've installed "mediamtx" (which supports RTSP protocols) and "ffmpeg" for streaming frames.
2. I've installed "trackstudio" following the instructions from GitHub on my conda environment.
3. I made this simple block of code and ran it in my environment.

import trackstudio as ts
LOCAL_IP = <ip_of_my_laptop> 

app = ts.launch(
    rtsp_streams=[
        f"rtsp://{LOCAL_IP}:8554/mystream" 
    ],
    camera_names=["mystream"],
    tracker="rfdetr",
    server_name="0.0.0.0", 
    server_port=8000,   
    open_browser=False 
)

4. So I opened the interface on my laptop at: http://<ip_of_remote_machine>:8000/mystream

So the issue is: I can't see my streaming in the interface, the button "start combined stream" doesn't work, returning a frontend error, but there are no logs from the block of running trackstudio.

As a matter of fact, streaming is working correctly because I could successfully display it on my laptop using localhost on port 8889, as it's written in the mediamtx YAML.

Do I understand correctly that trackstudio only supports "Thinklet Cube"?

[Pragyanstha]

hi @cmpolik
trackstudio should work with any rtsp streams.
Can you give me a bit more detail about your setup ? from what i understand, you have the mediamtx running on your local machine which you have verified rtsp streams working find by accessing from localhost. Can you check if the remote machine can access the rtsp streams from your laptop through ffmpeg ?

[cmpolik]

Detailed every step and experiments I tried:
As I said, my task is running video frames and streaming them from laptops' cameras to a remote machine and deploying TrackStudio on the remote machine to see the results of detection.

1. I downloaded "mediamtx" from https://github.com/bluenviron/mediamtx on macOS (everything is the same for 2 macOS computers).
2. I ran it on each laptop using the command ./mediamtx (local).
3. I downloaded "ffmpeg" (local).
4. I ran ffmpeg on each laptop using the command: (local)

ffmpeg -re -f avfoundation -framerate 30 -i "0" \  
-vf "transpose=1,format=yuv420p,setpts=PTS-STARTPTS" \  
-c:v libx264 \  
-preset veryfast \  
-tune zerolatency \  
-pix_fmt yuv420p \  
-b:v 2M \  
-g 60 \  
-f rtsp -rtsp_transport tcp rtsp://localhost:8554/mystream  

5. Then I checked if streaming from each of the laptops was working by accessing the corresponding HTTP endpoints in the browser (those endpoints stream the "contents" of the RTSP stream on another port). I did the same on the remote machine via VSCode (I'm connecting to the remote machine in VSCode using Remote-SSH; my web client is the VS Browser extension) and it worked successfully there too - I could see the video stream.

6. Then I checked if I could start the combined video stream in TrackStudio. I ran the following code on my local machine on CPU (macOS):

import trackstudio as ts  
LOCAL_IP_0 = <ip_1st_laptop>  
LOCAL_IP_1 = <ip_2nd_laptop>  

app = ts.launch(  
    rtsp_streams=[  
        f"rtsp://{LOCAL_IP_0}:8554/mystream",  
        f"rtsp://{LOCAL_IP_1}:8554/mystream"  
    ],  
    camera_names=["mystream1", "mystream2"],  
    tracker="rfdetr",  
    server_name="0.0.0.0",  
    server_port=8000,  
    open_browser=False  
)  

The combined video stream was working, as well as tracking.

7. Then I ran TrackStudio on the remote machine, using the same code snippet, and I opened the browser on the local laptop using the remote machine IP http://<remote_machine_ip>:8000/ and also in the VSCode browser (VS Browser extension) on the remote machine by accessing http://0.0.0.0:8000/. In both cases, I could access the TrackStudio frontend, "Connected" with a green dot displayed at the top, stream1 and stream2 successfully displayed in the interface, but by clicking "start combined stream," I got the error "Combined stream error: connection timeout:"

Here are the logs of the TrackStudio block of code:

📡 Configured 1 stream for TrackStudio  
Loading pretrained weights  
Successfully loaded ImageNet pretrained weights from "/home/user/.cache/torch/checkpoints/osnet_x1_0_imagenet.pth"  
** The following layers are discarded due to unmatched keys or layer size: ['classifier.weight', 'classifier.bias']  
Model: osnet_x1_0  
-   params: 2,193,616  
-   flops: 978,878,352  
Successfully loaded ImageNet pretrained weights from "/home/user/.cache/torch/checkpoints/osnet_x0_25_imagenet.pth"  
** The following layers are discarded due to unmatched keys or layer size: ['classifier.weight', 'classifier.bias']  
Model: osnet_x0_25  
-   params: 203,568  
-   flops: 82,316,000  
INFO:     Started server process [3194664]  
INFO:     Waiting for application startup.  
INFO:     Application startup complete.  

🚀 TrackStudio is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/  

✨ TrackStudio is running!  
Press Ctrl+C to stop.  

📶 Signaling state changed to: stable for stream_conn_2  
📶 Signaling state changed to: stable for stream_conn_2  
🧊 ICE gathering state changed to: gathering for stream_conn_2  
🧊 ICE gathering state changed to: complete for stream_conn_2  
🧊 ICE connection state changed to: checking for stream_conn_2  
🔗 RTCPeerConnection state changed to: connecting for stream_conn_2  
INFO:     connection closed  
2025-07-31 21:22:12 - trackstudio.core.api.webrtc - ERROR: Error processing message from stream_conn_1: (<CloseCode.ABNORMAL_CLOSURE: 1006>, '')  
📶 Signaling state changed to: closed for stream_conn_1  
🧊 ICE connection state changed to: closed for stream_conn_1  
🔗 RTCPeerConnection state changed to: closed for stream_conn_1  

I also don't get any new logs in the terminal where I'm running the mediamtx server on both of the laptops (i.e., I don't see the connection attempts), while in the case of deploying TrackStudio locally on the laptop, I got connection attempt logs in the terminal where ./mediamtx was running.

[Pragyanstha]

can you try to run the mediamtx server on the remote side as well ? since you dont see any connection attempts to the mediamtx server i am curious if the stream from the laptop is actually accessible to the remote machine. In step 5 can you record the rtsp stream in the remote host using ffmpeg (with rtsp stream as input)?

[cmpolik]

I successfully ran metdimtx on the remote machine, and it seems like everything is working correctly, but somehow I can't see even the stream in the browser. Also, I have only 4 ports opened on the remote machine, and maybe this isn't enough... It seems like the whole problem could be in the mediamtx config (yml) file because of the default configurations. Can you please share the minimal content of the config file for mediamtx that will work for trackstudio and for running just the stream in the browser?

[Pragyanstha]

the default mediamtx config actually very permissive (accepts connections from any source). Could you share the ffmpeg command for publishing the rtsp streams? what does the docker logs from mediamtx say when these streams are opened ?