FMS 4 and FMS 3.5 drops live stream after some time, when publishing from FFMPEG

[Guest]

Hi,

I'm having a reliability problem with publishing live, h.264 streams from FFMPEG (using the rtmp publish ability now built into FFMPEG, where I can set an rtmp address as the output).

After a random period of time (usually between an hour and several hours), the default "live" application in FMS 4 (or 3.5) eventually drops the connection from the FFMPEG encoder. This is what appears in the log for the application:

"Dropping application (live/_definst_) message. Clients not allowed to broadcast message."

After googling the error, I discovered that people have been reporting this error for several years, but there has not been a single response from any FMS experts or Adobe about what causes the error.

Any thoughts on what is causing this error? If you need any more information about how to replicate the error, I'd be more than happy to comply.

Thanks!

-Tuan

[SE_0208]

When your publishing is stopped, what logs do you see at server end, can you check core/edge logs.

[NpComplete]

It seems a problem in FFMPEG implementation.. Baiscally they have put a wrong stream id in the rtmp message which shows its a broadcast message.

Anyways I will get back on this thread..

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply.

I checked the edge logs, and nothing unusual appears, and in the core logs, no errors are reported at the time codes corresponding to the "Dropping application" error found in the application logs.

I did find one error that appeared in the core log, that, I believe, resulted in a disconnect, but it seems to be an anomaly since it doesn't coincide with the "Dropping application errors". I found the error listed below once last night, but the "Dropping application" and disconnect occurred ~6 times in the same time period. Just in case it might be enlightening, here's the error anyway:

#Version: 1.0

#Start-Date: 2010-09-17 01:02:37

#Software: Adobe Flash Media Server 4.0.0 r1121 x64

#Date: 2010-09-17

#Fields: date   time    x-pid   x-status        x-ctx   x-comment

2010-09-17      01:02:37        10087   (e)2611029      Bad network data; terminating connection : chunkstream error:message length 12517376 is longerthan max rtmp packet length       -

2010-09-17      01:02:37        10087   (e)2611392      Exception while processing message: Unexpected virtual message from client 4702111234592424303: 91 00 00 00 00 00 / FF 00 00 01         -

-Tuan

[Guest]

Thanks Nitin Goel for the reply.

Do you have any ideas about how I might be able to fix this? I've been looking at the relevant ffmpeg source code (see link below), but I'm not familiar enough with the RTMP protocol to spot such a mistake.

I'm going to submit this to the ffmpeg list as well, and mention what you just told me. In the meantime, if you or anyone else on this list can spot the problem in the current ffmpeg rtmp protocol code (see link below), that would be really helpful and I, and the rest of the ffmpeg community, would be deeply appreciative.

Thanks!

-Tuan

FFMPEG Source: http://www.ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-export-snapshot.tar.bz2

** Relevant rtmp code inside the tar ball seems to be: libavformat/rtmpproto.c

[Ed_Chan]

This also indicates possibly bad data being sent by the encoder; possibly malformed rtmp data.

[BDL]

This may be of assistance:

broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/11/flash-media-serverffmpeg-annoy-1.html