Using ffprobe to verify stream

Jun 2017

Using netstat and ip, we can see what multicasts are present on an interface, we can use iperf to join that multicast, and tcpdump to record it.
Another tool we can use is ffprobe, which is part of ffmpeg. ffprobe allows us to analyse the stream to verify it is what we expect (the correct resolution, codec, audio etc).

Installation

Before we can use ffprobe we will have to install ffmpeg. However, to do this we will have to also add the ATRPMS repository to CentOS.

Adding ATRPMS Repository

ATRPMS is a 3’rd party rpm repository providing up to date packages for Red Hat based systems. We can used it for directly downloading packages or we can use one of the available package manager tools.
To enable atrpms yum repository first login to system using root access. Now import ATrpms signing key for verifying packages using following command.

rpm --import http://packages.atrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms