What steps are needed to stream RTSP from FFmpeg?

FWIW, I was able to setup a local RTSP server for testing purposes using simple-rtsp-server and ffmpeg following these steps:

1. Create a configuration file for the RTSP server called rtsp-simple-server.yml with this single line:

   protocols: [tcp]
   

2. Start the RTSP server as a Docker container:

   $ docker run --rm -it -v $PWD/rtsp-simple-server.yml:/rtsp-simple-server.yml -p 8554:8554 aler9/rtsp-simple-server
   

3. Use ffmpeg to stream a video file (looping forever) to the server:

   $ ffmpeg -re -stream_loop -1 -i test.mp4 -f rtsp -rtsp_transport tcp rtsp://localhost:8554/live.stream
   

Once you have that running you can use ffplay to view the stream:

$ ffplay -rtsp_transport tcp rtsp://localhost:8554/live.stream

Note that simple-rtsp-server can also handle UDP streams (i.s.o. TCP) but that's tricky running the server as a Docker container.

You can use FFserver to stream a video using RTSP.

Just change console syntax to something like this:

ffmpeg -i space.mp4 -vcodec libx264 -tune zerolatency -crf 18 http://localhost:1234/feed1.ffm

Create a ffserver.config file (sample) where you declare HTTPPort, RTSPPort and SDP stream. Your config file could look like this (some important stuff might be missing):

HTTPPort 1234
RTSPPort 1235

<Feed feed1.ffm>
        File /tmp/feed1.ffm
        FileMaxSize 2M
        ACL allow 127.0.0.1
</Feed>

<Stream test1.sdp>
    Feed feed1.ffm
    Format rtp
    Noaudio
    VideoCodec libx264
    AVOptionVideo flags +global_header
    AVOptionVideo me_range 16
    AVOptionVideo qdiff 4
    AVOptionVideo qmin 10
    AVOptionVideo qmax 51
    ACL allow 192.168.0.0 192.168.255.255
</Stream>

With such setup you can watch the stream with i.e. VLC by typing:

rtsp://192.168.0.xxx:1235/test1.sdp

Here is the FFserver documentation.