Continuous streaming from an empty pipe, then adding data to the pipe on demand

Question

Essentially, what I'd like to do is to have ffmpeg continuously stream to an RTMP server using an empty pipe, then when I want to stream something, add data to the pipe.

My reasons for doing this are, I'm piping videos from an external source. Whenever the video has finished, ffmpeg crashes because it's receiving no data and I have to open it again.

Is this possible? If not, is there another way around this?

My current command is:

ffmpeg -i pipe:0 -re -c copy -f flv rtmp://mystream.com/key

pipe:0 is an instance of ytdl.

Answer 1

The way I got around this was using my own RTMP server to stream the video to the host.

I pipe my video to the local RTMP server using

mkfifo x

ytdl http://youtube.com/watch?v=12345 > x

ffmpeg -re -i x -c copy -f flv rtmp://mylocalRTMPserver/stream

Then create a stream from that to the host using

ffmpeg -re -i rtmp://mylocalRTMPserver/stream -c copy -f flv rtmp://mystream.com/key

If the above stream receives no input it stays open for around 30 seconds, allowing me to close the youtube pipe and open it again.

Whilst this works, there's extra overhead of having to run two instances of ffmpeg.