I was asked to disable live video broadcast for a day or two. If I stop feeding into Red5 streaming service the flash player will display as if buffering for ever. Not nice for end users who will report this as an error. It would be nice to show a message say “Video not available”. I made a picture for this purpose. ffmpeg works like a charm again this time.
ffmpeg -loop 1 -i not_available.png -r 5 -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -f flv rtmp://red5server:1935/live/myStream
The only trick here is the colour space which if I don’t specify will result a black background showing on flash players. This may only apply to PNG file since I didn't try JPEG but the official site recommends using this parameter when producing video from a single image.