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Hi
We’ve so far run three live streams through Pro version 7.4.24.727
We have had issues ourselves, and reported by users that the player is freezing randomly. We have been trying different bitrates, and we think it’s worse at higher bitrates, but don’t have enough hours to know for sure.
Our streams are 2-3 hours long.
We are casting from a studio, with no dropped frames reported from OBS
We are using Microsoft Azure Media Services as the transcoding and streaming service, which is automatically hooked into a CDN for delivery of the m3u8 files.
I’m generally testing in Chrome and Firefox, on PC and Mac – both are new high-spec laptops.
Our worst experience was at 4000kbps, where we all had several freezes
Last night I had two freezes within the two hours.
I was able to grab a HAR file from DevTools for one of the crashes on Friday night. It shows four requests with a “Finished” status, and zero bytes (see screengrab). I also noted this message in the console:
GET https://sts-cdn-ourdomain-ukso1.streaming.media.azure.net/0e0ed012-8dc1-4686-94fb-dee959459182/9a1151b3-6e82-4bdb-a021-2430ef820614.ism/QualityLevels(5500000)/Manifest(video,format=m3u8-aapl) net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED
I’m not sure if this is consistent, or not, but certainly the name (assuming DNS domain name) should resolve without issues as all previous requests use the same CDN domain.
Hope you can help. Top of my System Info is below.
Multisite: No
SITE_URL: https://ourdomain.net
HOME_URL: https://ourdomain.net
Plugin URL: https://ourdomain.net/wp-content/plugins/fv-wordpress-flowplayerFV Player version: 7.4.24.727
FV Player core version: 7.2.7
FV Player license: Valid (next check 2020-08-10 11:52:31 GMT)FV Player Pro version: 7.4.31.727
FV Player Pro license: Valid (next check 2020-08-10 11:52:30 GMT)WordPress Version: 5.4.2
Permalink Structure: /%postname%/
Active Theme: EventBuilder – Event Builder WordPress Theme 1.0.14Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.105 Safari/537.36
PHP Version: 7.4.8
MySQL Version: 8.0.17
Web Server Info: Apache/2.4.37 (centos) OpenSSL/1.1.1cWordPress Memory Limit: 40M
PHP Memory Limit: 256M
PHP Upload Max Size: 32M
PHP Post Max Size: 32M
PHP Upload Max Filesize: 32M
PHP Time Limit: 30
PHP Max Input Vars: 10000
PHP Arg Separator: &
PHP Allow URL File Open: Yes
WP_DEBUG: DisabledDISPLAY ERRORS: N/A
cURL: Your server supports cURL.
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Hello techcolin,
Thanks for reaching out to us and providing all the information!
Can you please send us a link to your website with some scheduled livestream so we can test the freezing hands-on?
Thanks,
Juraj
Hello techcolin,
if the error was ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED then it looks to me like some issue with the CDN.
https://sts-cdn-ourdomain-ukso1.streaming.media.azure.net won’t resolve for me currently.
What’s the advantage of your setup over something simpler such as DaCast? Please let us know how does it compare: https://www.dacast.com/live-streaming-pricing-plans/
Then there is Vimeo with live streaming support as well: https://vimeo.com/upgrade Vimeo allowed 3rd party players to play their live streams recently, so we should add support for that.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi – sorry for the delay in getting back.
We ran our own stream on Saturday night and we noted the player freezing when OBS dropped frames. It happened three times and according to obs it was due to bandwidth issues at my end (unstable consumer fibre I guess).
Anyway, should FV Player not recover from an event like this. I think we dropped around 40 frames each time it happened, but the Azure stream kept going.
It needed a page refresh to restart. Pause/Play didn’t respond.
I didn’t have DevTools open this time unfortunately.
The domain above has been obfuscated hence why it won’t resolve. And we can’t use DaCast or a Vimeo due to costs being annual. We can pay as we go on Azure.
Hello techcolin,
I tried to play a HLS live stream with FV Player and I did block the network connection to the streaming server and I see it just failed to play and didn’t recover.
I did run into the same issue with Safari which supports HLS natively.
I see that improving this could be a nice new feature in FV Player. But since it would require a separate code for Safari (mainly on iPhone) it wouldn’t be so easy.
Thanks,
Martin
So we have just done some more testing on this. I have been streaming from OBS using our normal Azure infrastructure, with an HLS live endpoint.
By unplugging and re-plugging the ethernet cable on our server I’ve been dropping around 300 frames each time.
The Akamai HLS.js test player is fault tolerant. The audio kept playing, and the screen stuttered, however it resynchronised successfully.
https://players.akamai.com/players/hlsjs
We also tested using Castr.io and their own player, which behaved well too.
In my view all players should be fault-tolerant on the stream. Especially live streams as dropped frames are likely to happen for various reasons.
This is a basic requirement not a feature request. Could you imagine YouTube player crashing and needing a page refresh, or any other major player.
We’ve now been using FV Player for six weeks and we have three bugs open with you (and others not reported). This issue and the Chromecast issue make the player not fit for purpose in my view.
Who should I speak to about a refund? We paid for Pro to make sure we got a solid working player.
Hello Colin,
if there is an issue we like to fix it. If we are not able to do so, then we can talk about a refund. As you noted you haven’t replied for a month.
Akamai is using HLS.js just like we do, so we can do that improvement. I was only mentioning that it won’t fix the issue entirely for iOS.
When testing with that Akamai player the stream doesn’t come back for me after disconnecting for too long and it doesn’t show any error in that case. So nothing is perfect, but we will cover these basics like connection dropping for a couple of segments.
Thanks,
Martin
Hello Colin,
if you have a moment could you please reinstall FV Player from this link? https://github.com/foliovision/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/archive/master.zip To do that you will have to first deactivate and delete the current FV Player plugin you are using. WordPress will warn you that you might loose settings and data, but it’s not the case with our plugin, no settings now videos will be lost. Or you can just replace the plugin files via FTP.
I enhanced our live stream count-down routine to also work when in middle of the stream. If you try to play a stream which is not available you get a “We are sorry, currently no live stream available” message with 30 second countdown.
Then if it fails in the middle, you get “It appears the stream went down” with a 10 second countdown.
Thanks,
Martin
