VLC's reaction to disconnects in the incoming stream

[RobMeades]

I have VLC (3.0.8) running as a service on Ubuntu (Ubuntu 18.04.3) transcoding a live HTTP stream (from a camera monitoring something) and making it available in a mobile browser compatible format (so VLC has no display/GUI and there is no user involved). I would like the transcoding process to be robust to the incoming stream dropping out (which will happen when someone reboots something, power fails, etc.).

At the moment when the incoming stream drops out VLC stops dead (i.e. with -vvv specified all debug output just stops) but it does not recover when the source is available once more and it does not exit so I can't recover.

I've tried putting vlc://quit on the end of the command-line and I've tried adding the parameter --play-and-exit but those haven't made VLC quit on error. I've tried adding --http-reconnect and also -R to make VLC reconnect by itself but that hasn't helped. I've tried using cvlc instead of vlc but that makes no difference either.

What else might I try?

FYI, my systemd unit file is of the following form:

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[Unit] Description=Video transcoder After=network.target [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target [Service] # Start VLC service User=vlcd ExecStart=/usr/bin/vlc -I dummy http://mystreamurl --syslog --sout="#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=256,venc=x264{aud,profile=baseline,level=30,keyint=30,ref=1},acodec=mp3,ab=96}:std{access=livehttp{seglen=5,delsegs=true,numsegs=10,index=/var/www/mysite/public_html/myfiles.m3u8,index-url=myfiles-########.ts},mux=ts{use-key-frames},dst=/var/www/mysite/public_html/myfiles-########.ts}" Restart=always RestartSec=10 Type=simple [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[RobMeades]

It doesn't seem possible to make VLC exit or recover after a disconnect in the incoming stream so, because my output is HTTP Live Stream, I have implemented a workaround where I run a systemd timer every couple of minutes to check the age of the .m3u8 index file that VLC is writing. If it is more than a minute old I reboot the webcam from which the stream is coming and then restart the systemd service that is running VLC. This seems to work for me.

FYI then, I have a systemd unit file /etc/systemd/system/streamchecker.service with contents:

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[Unit] Description=VLC stream checker [Service] ExecStart=/etc/streamchecker.sh

...a systemd timer unit file /etc/systemd/system/streamchecker.timer with contents:

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[Unit] Description=VLC stream checker [Timer] # Run soon after boot and then every 120 seconds OnBootSec=10 OnUnitActiveSec=120 AccuracySec=1 # This is required to make the OnUnitActiveSec directive work reliably # see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6680 Requires=streamchecker.service [Install] WantedBy=timers.target

...and then a script file /etc/streamchecker.sh (marked as executable with sudo chmod +x /etc/streamchecker.sh) which does the work:

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#!/bin/bash logger StreamChecker: checking if VLC is streaming... unix_last_update=$(stat -c %Y /var/www/mystreamingwebsite/public_html/mystream.m3u8) unix_time_now=$(date +%s) age=$(( ${unix_time_now} - ${unix_last_update} )) limit=60 logger StreamChecker: stream last updated ${age} second\(s\) ago. if (( ${age} > ${limit} )); then logger StreamChecker: more than ${limit} seconds, checking if the incoming stream can be restarted... # Do the rebooting/whatever here logger StreamChecker: restarting the VLC streaming service... systemctl restart mystream.service fi