Hi,
I don’t have special advices to give regarding the h264 encoding parameters. They must be "well suited" for your needs. I mean it should be the perfect balance between quality, bitrate and performance. Finding that sensitive point of equilibrium is an ongoing process as you may (or already) discover. Trial and error basically. Every environment has its own constraints and freedoms which will basically dictate the encoding parameters. Bottom line, there is no secret recipe.
As for the issues between EMS and player while the source is restarted, I’m afraid I don’t have any good work around :(” />. It is what it is: the stream, when restarted, may change the encoding params and that confuses some of the players (makes VLC crash for example). the second problem is the timestamps which are always starting from 0 for RTMP. So there is not continuity on the input streams. That also confuses the players. EMS does all it can: replicates those timestamps.
Best regards,
Andrei