Alert on RTMP stream buffering/stop

[megrir]

Hi! I'm new to the forum, but I searched some pages for a similar topic, but I couldn't find any. So here it goes:

I have to watch a stream in 12 hour shifts, and during the day it's fine, but during the nights, it's really boring, and uneventful. It's not a security camera, or anything like that, let's just say it's something like a ski-cam. Landscape. Part of my job is calling someone if the stream is gone.

I already set up a free periodic check account on a website, which checks from 5 servers around the world, every five minutes, and sends an e-mail if any of the servers can't reach the stream. But it takes 10-15 minutes to get the e-mail, which is kind of a long time. It could check more often, if I set up a linux server and whatnot, but I have zero experience with that. And I still don't know how much time it would take to send the e-mail.

Is there any way to set up VLC, so it is playing the stream (audio track muted because the wind noise is getting on my nerves), but if it loses connection, and starts to buffer, it doesn't try forever to reconnect (which sometimes doesn't happen, even if the stream comes back), instead for example after 20 seconds of trying to reconnect, it jumps to the next item in the playlist, namely alarm_the_stream_is_gone.mp3. I tried it, and it worked the very first time, but since then, it just tries to play the stream with no end in sight.

Any other ideas on solving this would be greatly appreciated.

tl;dr: Is it possible to set VLC so it jumps to the next item in playlist if the viewed stream buffers for more than 20 seconds?

[Ultrapower]

VLC is not buffering RTMP flv streams !

You can set network-caching to xxxx ms but no reaction