Using FFmpeg in listen mode to make it a stand-alone RTMP server

You can have FFmpeg run in listen mode and make it behave like a stand-alone RTMP live-stream server. In this article you can find some examples on how to accomplish this.

ffmpeg -f flv -listen 1 -i rtmp://localhost:1935/live/app -c copy rtsp://YOUR_RTSP_HOST

• -listen 1 makes FFmpeg act as a RTMP server when used with RTMP protocol.
• Use rtmp://localhost:1935/live/app as the RTMP server url on the source.
• You can set any playpath rtmp://localhost:1935/any/thing and any port.
• The main advantage with this way is simplicity, the disadvantage is server stops if source stopped or had encoding errors.
• The other option is to use nginx with nginx-rtmp-module.

For example the following command will generate a signal, and will stream it to the port 1234 on localhost:

ffmpeg -re -f lavfi -i aevalsrc="sin(400*2*PI*t)" -ar 8000 -f mulaw -f rtp rtp://127.0.0.1:1234

To play the stream with ffplay (which has some caveats, see above), run the command:

ffplay rtp://127.0.0.1:1234

Note that TP by default uses UDP, which, for large streams, can cause packet loss.