[FFmpeg-user] FFmpeg won't stay connected to Wowza server over the internet.

[Leonard Bogard]

I've setup a new and updated version of the Amazon AMI EC2 machine image of
a Wowza server for live streaming.  I'm trying to migrate away from Adobe's
Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE) on Windows and change to FFmpeg on Linux.
I am currently running the server version of Ubuntu with a Decklink SDI
input card using "bmdcapture" to pipe into FFmpeg.  I am using the "tee"
command to split the data to two separate instances of FFmpeg, one to
record to the local harddrive and another to rtmp stream to the remote
Wowza server.  At the moment I am using 3 named pipes to do all this.

If I setup FFmpeg to RTMP to a Wowza server running on a machine behind my
internet router, everything appears to run absolutely fine.  I've left it
running for 5 hours once (much longer than I plan to run it for
continuously) and I get no problems.  Zero, nada, zilch.  It will continue
to run for as long as I don't tell it to stop.  I've tested it connecting
to a Wowza server on Windows XP, a Wowza on a modern Mac, and a Wowza on a
virtual Ubuntu machine.

However, if I RTMP to the remote (over-the-internet) Wowza server, after
about some random period of time that is sometimes 10 minutes to as short
as 10 seconds after connecting, it just drops, with no connection specific
error messages or anything.  It does this all the time.  The only way I am
able to keep a connection is if I set the bitrate to 100K or lower, but
sometimes 200K.

Now for the kicker: FMLE works fine at 500K+ to the same remote server.  It
will stay connected, it seems, no matter what.

The big reasons why I want to migrate away from FMLE is that FMLE can't
seem to keep the audio in sync, the recording to the HDD is [teh] crap
(probably because it just saves the encoded frames from the stream instead
of remuxing to a file format), the volume is way too low, it doesn't have
an internal video resampler to get the size of the video we need (which
makes it incompatible with the Decklink card), and it absolutely will not
do 48Khz audio sample rate or AAC.

Here's a pastebin of my bash script to startup FFmpeg (with alot of
commands related to recorded file maintenance and PID based process
protection/management removed for sake of readability/simplicity.)

http://pastebin.com/2Ht3wxJb

Any help appreciated.  TIA