Massive loss in quality with ffmpeg rtmp push

Question

I've been streaming successfully with nginx-rtmp for a little while. Using the inbuilt push directive works great but to push to variable stream names I have to switch to using ffmpeg.

Even when I don't transcode the stream at all there seems to be a huge loss in quality.

I've tried the following but both appear grainy and low bitrate. The input stream is 720p at 1500kbps.

/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i rtmp://localhost:1935/input/$name -f flv rtmp://example.com/app/name

/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i rtmp://localhost:1935/input/$name  -c:v copy -c:a copy -aspect -f flv rtmp://example.com/app/name

Answer 1

It turns out the valid syntax for my version of ffmpeg was

/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i -c copy rtmp://localhost:1935/input/$name -f flv rtmp://example.com/app/name