Aiming at widely used H.264 protocol, a kind of streaming media player system was designed based on SDL and ffmpeg. After unpacked, streaming media data packed by RTP protocol coule be decoded by ffmpeg, and shown by SDL, streaming media data could be saved in local file system for invocation at the same time. Experiment showed that the system had good real time performance and image quality. Besides, the system also had a good extensibility and portability because of the professional platform independence provided by ffmpeg and SDL, these features made the system suitable for embedded device and mobile terminal.