First off - thanks for all the help I've received from everyone here, both directly and indirectly. Searching these forums
has kept me sane in the darkest of times while I have travelled this road of TV joy !
Ok, I have a recurring problem with a VLC stream and I wondered if I could ask you knowledgeable people how I can work around it.
I'm transcoding a DVB-T channel using X264 and FFMPeg to produce an HTTP published FLV stream.
Initially, with Ubuntu 10.10 & VLC 1.1.7 it wouldn't run for long before it crashed out.
Then I had audio sync problems which could not be resolved due to something in the DVB standard which VLC didn't like.
After numerous problems with versions and libxxx failures, I now have a very stable system, using Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit and VLC 1.0.6 (Goldeneye)
So what is my problem you ask ?
Every now and then, it seems like I get a "blip" in the source, and although the video continues without an error, the audio is gone completely.
I am playing out through a local webpage with Flowplayer. If I test the stream using my desktop VLC, i get the following error ...
No suitable decoder module:
VLC does not support the audio or video format "undf". Unfortunately there is no way for you to fix this.
The video still plays but no audio. The audio track is selectable, but selecting it brings the error back.
If I restart the stream in VLM, and refresh the player, it all works again until the next time ....
I've set the audio-sync option and that makes no difference at all.
So ... it's not a fault with VLC, but it is causing it to lose it's audio capabilities.
I don't object to restarting the stream to fix it, but it is frequent enough to be irritating.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to, either...
1 .... make VLC able to recognise and recover from this right away, which strikes me as a tall order, AND unreasonable,
or ....
2 .... be able to detect it (cron) and restart the stream automatically (telnet)
Anyone have any thoughts on how I might achieve either of these ?
I am trying another path too ... I am going to try transcoding to an RTP stream, instead of Flash, and see if this is more resilient.
I used to use this format, but I had terrible trouble using the VLC plugins to display it. Has to be worth another go.
Thanks for listening and if anyone has any ideas I would very much appreciate your input.
Cheers everyone,
Jack.