With the rapid growth of vehicles scale in China, the development of public transportation has become an effective way of controlling urban traffic problems. However, the continuous occurrence of public traffic accidents has caused widespread concern in China. Hence, how to efficiently monitor the security status in the bus is becoming a hot research field. In this paper, the H.264 video compression standard and real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) are introduced to achieve real-time transmission of surveillance video. Besides, a real-time bus monitoring system combining with 4G transmission, GPS, FPGA and network camera technologies is designed to achieve real-time bus video monitoring, positioning, and emergence handling. The system is actually tested in two Beijing bus lines, and is proved by practice that the system can effectively improve the efficiency of bus monitoring and positioning with features such as short video setup time, clear bus video, and accurate bus positioning.