Say you're building a computer vision application that processes live CCTV footage. You connect a couple of cameras, test the application, and everything works fine. Then you need to find out how it handles 50 or 100 cameras at once.

I'd rather not buy 100 CCTV cameras just to answer that question.

That got me thinking about how to simulate multiple RTSP streams without physical cameras or unreliable public RTSP links. Could a few MP4 files behave like live camera feeds?

With FFmpeg and MediaMTX, we can loop those MP4 videos and give each one its own RTSP URL. Let's start with one video, then use a Bash script to run a whole folder of them as virtual CCTV cameras.