ffserver daemon mode

[andrixnet]

ffserver much older versions, at 0.5 times, would fork to background as a daemon, as every "server" program does.

Current behaviour of ffserver, at 2.2.1 level (but change was fairly recent), one can only background it via the "&" shell operator.

I have to say that this makes ffserver look like a toy server.
It has logging capability to a file, but it lacks forking to background upon starting like any *NIX daemon and lacks a debug mode command line switch that prevents it from forking, forcing foreground mode and logging to console instead.

These functionalities existed in ffserver older versions, but seem to have been removed intentionally.

I submit this bug as a request to restore these functionalities in ffserver and thus returning it's status as a serious media streaming application.

Thank you.

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Please provide the revision that removed the requested behaviour.

[andrixnet]

I used ffserver 0.5 (linux) with ffmpeg-r20428-mingw32-static (2009 generation) on windows as encoders.

ffserver at that stage did have the functionality described.

Excerpt from ffserver-0.5 or 0.6 documentation:

`-d' 
Enable debug mode. This option increases log verbosity, directs log messages to stdout and causes ffserver to run in the foreground rather than as a daemon. 

---

Unfortunately, I have switched to 2.2.x version directly, so I do not know exactly when did this functionality dissapear.
Later versions (around ffmpeg-1.x) were incompatible with ffserver-0.5, so I kept my working solution at 0.5 level, until I had to do a major server (hardware) refit.

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Please run git bisect to find the change introducing the regression you are seeing.

[Clément Bœsch]

Probably this:

commit ada51a334aeb1e378fe852c8b5eede9cbbd05f69
Author: Mans Rullgard <mans@mansr.com>
Date:   Wed Apr 25 12:08:54 2012 +0000

    avserver: remove daemon mode
    
    This code spews a multitude of warnings with glibc (unchecked
    return values), some of them possibly warranted.  Furthermore,
    the deamonisation is not suitable for use with typical startup
    scripts as it does not provide the PID of the daemon in any way.
    Users wishing to run avserver as a daemon can still do so using
    start-stop-daemon or equivalent tools.
    
    Signed-off-by: Mans Rullgard <mans@mansr.com>
    Signed-off-by: Janne Grunau <janne-libav@jannau.net>

Note that Libav recently dropped avserver alltogether. We still keep it because it seems we have a maintainer. Unfortunately, there is not much development around ffserver, and contributors are extremely welcome.

[andrixnet]

Do you mean to say that ffserver will dissappear altogether from ffmpeg distribution in the near future?

[Clément Bœsch]

No, the av/ffserver drop wasn't merged. See ​http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=commit;h=daa7bccad2279d43e7173dba0174c2052a65a51f

But it's still a huge maintenance burden and we need developers. Typically, it's not even covered by our test suite, and few FFmpeg developers (none?) use it.

[Rostislav Pehlivanov]

ffserver got dropped from git master, closing bug as no longer valid