Still looking for a solution

[Federico Zamperini]

Sorry, I have no time to entirely read your email, so my solution may 
not suit your needs.
I shared an IP camera to many (identical) clients using RTSP.
I used gst_rtsp_relay (https://github.com/alessandrod/gst-rtsp-relay), 
which relays one (RTSP) stream -- the camera's one -- to many RTSP 
clients. As you may already know RTSP is based on TCP and provides 
control (for example negotiating caps between server and client) for 
streaming media using RTP (over UDP -- default -- or TCP).
The clients were based on playbin2, but you can build your custom client 
using rtspsrc, a depayloader, a decoder, and a sink (video, file or fake).
playbin2 (playbin in 1.0) is extremely flexible and IIRC you can even 
switch the default sink with a custom element (for example filesink 
instead of videosink); playbin is very smart and chooses the right 
depayloaders, decoders, scalers, converters etc.
You can use it or you can just peep to see what element it has chosen.
Cheers

Federico