Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)'s status on Thursday, 10-Oct-2024 03:54:55 JST

If you're trying to build a cable broadcast network powered by free software in the future, and you're using FFPlayout as your playout software, great!

ffplayout just can't deliver a consistent enough timecode, and I don't know why.

So skip doing SRT output from ffplayout. Have ffplayout spit a very basic mpegts stream out over udp, and then system job in that runs an ffmpeg process that pulls your ffplayout output and adds all the stuff that the broadcast group is going to need.

YMMV, you'll need different stuff than we do, but what we need is:

-re for real time encoding on the input side and

-bufsize 3M \
-maxrate:v 6M \
-minrate:v 6M \
-b:v 6M \
-muxrate 8M \
-pcr_period 30 \
-pat_period 0.1 \
-qmax 1024 \
-mpegts_start_pid 32 \
-sc_threshold 1000000000 \
-flags +cgop \
-g 30 \
-f tee \
-f mpegts -c:v mpeg2video -c:a ac3 -mpegts_flags +pat_pmt_at_frames \
-use_fifo 1 -fifo_options 'attempt_recovery=1' [SRT URL and Parameters HERE]

on the output side.

I could explain what all that does, but I'm not going to because my brain is melting.

It took two days to happen upon this particular solution.

I hate it, but it's working so I'm moving on.