Is it possible to send video chunks to a Kafka broker using MediaMTX?

[barzan-hayati]

Question

First of all, thank you for your amazing repository. I previously worked with rtsp-simple-server, and it was excellent.
I'm not very familiar with MediaMTX, so I wanted to ask here.

I know how to create video chunks using FFmpeg and save them directly to disk, but processing them requires reading from the disk. Instead, I want to achieve this via a message broker.

My goal is to capture video chunks—say, 30-second segments—from RTSP cameras and send them to a message broker like Kafka. Then, I would retrieve those chunks from the broker for further processing.

Can MediaMTX facilitate this workflow?

[aler9]

Hello, the problem of Kafka is that it is not designed to handle video streaming, even if video is splitted in chunks, in particular, the maximum message size is 1MB, which is of course not enough for the purpose.

However, the technique that is always used in these cases consists in storing video chunks on an object store (i.e. S3 or Azure Blob Storage or MinIO) and then publish the object URL through Kafka. The Kafka consumer will then consume the message, read the chunk from the object store and delete it after processing.