On Fri, 13 Nov 2009, Chris Conroy wrote:

> I'm scoping an RTSP based project at the moment, and I think adding RTSP
> support to cURL would be a good route to take. I have noticed that there has
> been some interest expressed in the past for RTSP support, and it is listed
> on the TODO as one of the future protocols to support.

Yeps. I've had requests for it in the past, and I've pondered on working on it
at times but it never got that high up on my list to actually make me start
working on it.

> Is anyone else interested in helping to develop it? Let me know.

I'll offer my help and assistance. I can't promise I'll push for it much, but
I'll review code and offer my ideas and guidance on how to proceed with
incorporating a new protocol into libcurl.

In fact, I have some pending work going on that will introduce support for a
few other protocols as well. More about that at a later time.

> Also, if anyone has any general thoughts/suggestions on what needs to happen
> with RTSP within the cURL context to help guide my initial work, that would
> be helpful.

I have some vague ideas and I don't know RTSP very good so I may not have the
full insight but...

RTSP is very similar to HTTP. We need to figure out exactly how similar, and
quite likely we should add RTSP as a some kind of extension to HTTP so that
they can share as much code as possible. Of course we should make
RTSP-specific stuff in a separate file/functions and the same goes for the
non-RTSP parts of HTTP.

The best way to proceed with adding a new protocol, is to implement a test
server for it so that you can write up test cases for the curl test suite that
runs tests against the server and you can see that it behaves correctly.
Again, possibly the existing HTTP test server can be expanded to also support
RTSP.

Code-wise, a protocol is written in a new source file with a struct
Curl_handler instance (or several like if there's a SSL version etc) and you
add protocol bit(s) in the CURLPROTO_* style in include/curl/curl.h, default
ports (PROT_* defines) in lib/urldata.h and some version_info() magic into
lib/version.c.

For more, just ask!

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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