Issue with vlc not dropping feed cleanly.

[rogerlittin]

Hi,

I am using vlc 0.9.8a on fedora linux to grab rtsp mpeg4 streams from remote axis cameras and transcode them to h.264 to restream to flash player.

On the whole it works pretty well apart from I have an issue with 1 or 2 streams. They are 150kbps streams coming to the server via a adsl link at the source which has 800kbps upload capacity. Occasionally live555 within vlc reports that no data is recieved within 10 seconds and vlc stops the stream. To overcome this I have set vlc to loop mode on the current playlist item so that it will automatically restart the stream.

The owner of the adsl source reports that when this happens too much, his adsl link goes to maximum capacity and then vlc needs to be killed to release the streams.

What appears to be happening is when live555 stops recieving data, then vlc is not disconnecting from the original stream before starting a new stream so it ends up with the camera sending more & more streams to vlc until the bandwidth is maxed out. Another thing that happens which is probably related is if I do not have vlc in loop mode and the stream stops, If I try to close vlc then it continually reports dying input and needs to be killed.

Roger.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

VLC does disconnect before it reconnects. The architecture would not allow otherwise.

But, closing the RTSP connection does not terminate the RTP/UDP flows, so teh camera may continue sending these until it detects a timeout. This is a protocol design problem, VLC cannot fix this. At best, the camera could detect ICMP errors, but I cannot blame it for not doing so, as this is discouraged.

[rogerlittin]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply & explanation. Unfortunately it doesn't help my situation. Do you know if there is a way to get live555 to wait longer before deciding that there is no more data being recieved?