FFMPEG: RTSP to HLS restream stops with "No more output streams to write to, finishing."

Question

I'm trying to do a live restream an RTSP feed from a webcam using ffmpeg, but the stream repeatedly stops with the error:

"No more output streams to write to, finishing."

The problem seems to get worse at higher bitrates (256kbps is mostly reliable) and is pretty random in its occurrence. At 1mbps, sometimes the stream will run for several hours without any trouble, on other occasions the stream will fail every few minutes. I've got a cron job running which restarts the stream automatically when it fails, but I would prefer to avoid the continued interruptions.

I have seen this problem reported in a handful of other forums, so this is not a unique problem, but not one of those reports had a solution attached to it. My ffmpeg command looks like this:

ffmpeg -loglevel verbose -r 25 -rtsp_transport tcp -i rtsp://user:password@camera.url/live/ch0 -reset_timestamps 1 -movflags frag_keyframe+empty_moov -bufsize 7168k -stimeout 60000 -hls_flags temp_file -hls_time 5 -hls_wrap 180 -acodec copy -vcodec copy streaming.m3u8 > encode.log 2>&1

What gets me is that the error makes no sense, this is a live stream so output is always wanted until I shut off the stream. So having it shut down because output isn't wanted is downright odd. If ffmpeg was complaining because of a problem with input it would make more sense.

I'm running version 3.3.4, which I believe is the latest.

Update 13 Oct 17:

After extensive testing I've established that "No more outputs" error message generated by FFMPEG is very misleading. The error seems to be generated if the data coming in from RTSP is delayed, eg by other activity on the router the camera is connected via. I've got a large buffer and timeout set which should be sufficient for 60 seconds, but I can still deliberately trigger this error with far shorter interruptions, so clearly the buffer and timeout aren't having the desired effect. This might be fixed by setting a QOS policy on the router and by checking that the TCP packets from the camera have a suitably high priority set, it's possible this isn't the case.

However, I would still like to improve the robustness of the input stream if it is briefly interrupted. Is there any way to persuade FFMPEG to tolerate this or to actually make use of the buffer it seems to be ignoring? Can FFMPEG be persuaded to simply stop writing output and wait for input to become available rather than bailing out? Or could I get FFMPEG to duplicate the last complete frame until it's able to get more data? I can live with the stream stuttering a bit, but I've got to significantly reduce the current behaviour where the stream drops at the slightest hint of a problem.

Further update 13 Oct 2017:

After more tests, I've found that the problem actually seems to be that HLS is incapable of coping with a discontinuity in the incoming video stream. If I deliberately cut the network connection between the camera and FFMPEG, FFMPEG will wait for the connection to be re-established for quite a long time. If the interruption was long (>10 seconds) the stream will immediately drop with the "No More Outputs" error the instant that the connection is re-established. If the interruption is short, then RTSP will actually start pulling data from the camera again, but the stream will then drop with the same error a few seconds later. So it seems clear that the gap in the input data is causing the HLS encoder to have a fit and give up once the stream is resumed, but the size of the gap has an impact on whether the drop is instant or not.

Answer 1

Been facing the same problem. After an extended trial and error i found that the problem resided in my cctv camera parameters. More exactly i adjusted the key frame interval parameter to match the frame-rate of the recording camera.

My syntax (windows)

SET cam1_rtsp="rtsp://192.168.0.93:554/11?timeout=30000000&listen_timeout=30000000&recv_buffer_size=30000000"

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -vsync -1 -re -i %cam1_rtsp% -vcodec copy -af apad -shortest -async 1 -strftime 1 -reset_timestamps 1 -metadata title=\\"Cam\\" -map 0 -f segment -segment_time 300 -segment_atclocktime 1 -segment_format mp4 CCTV\%%Y-%%m-%%d_%%H-%%M-%%S.mp4 -loglevel verbose

After this correction got a 120 hour smooth input stream with no errors.

Hope this helps anyone.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem. In my case stream stopped without any errors after few minutes. I fixed this by switching from freebsd to linux. Maybe the problem is bad package dependencies or ffmpeg version. So my suggestion is to try older or newer version of ffmpeg or another OS.

Update: Actually this doesn't solve the problem. I've tested a bit more and stream stopped after 15 minutes.