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Hi there,
Some of my clients are on a slow connection, so much so that even my 480p videos are difficult for them to stream. A workable solution for them is to pause the video and wait till it has fully loaded, but when they pause the video to enable the streaming buffer to catch up, it only catches up partially and hence can’t wait for the full video to download.
Is there a means of increasing the size of the streaming buffer to be the full length of the video once the video has started playing?
Much thanks!
Regards,
Katie
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Hi Katie,
I’ve forwarded your question to our Senior programmer Martin. He will get in touch with you later to answer your questions about the video buffering.
Thanks for using our player,
Juraj
Where are you hosting these videos Katie?
Could you share an example with us?
Thanks, Alec
Hi Alec,
Yes … go to http://www.katiesuzukimusic.com and play the landing page video.
All videos are hosted on Amazon AWS, hosted on the Asia Pacific (Sydney) server, serving to New Zealand.
Video was compiled to MP4 format using Lightworks video editor on the standard YouTube 480p and 720p outputs which I know work really well – however the 480p video has a 3.5Mbps bit rate, and the client lives rurally and has congestion issues and may be experiencing less than this minimum bitrate. They are ok with waiting as they are used to patchy internet, however they would rather not have to watch-wait-watch-wait etc.
The entire site is built with videos on these formats for teaching music. So I don’t really want to reduce the resolution or bitrate much more than the 480p format that I’m using.
Thanks for your help!
Regards,
Katie
Hello Katie,
3.6 Mbps is a bit rate suitable for 720p video. For a 480p video it should be 600 to 1000 kbps.
If you have users from other continents you should really be using a CDN. If S3 + CloudFront is too expensive, you can check KeyCDN which gives you the same level of protection as S3 with signed URLs, but it’s also a CDN already.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your answer. I think the issue really is in local congestion due to the rural connection.
I take it from your answer that it is also not possible to extend the streaming buffer?
The extended buffer (up to the whole video) would enable those suffering from bad internet connectivity to have a workable alternate solution (ie. waiting for it to load, and then watching it in full when loaded).
Regards,
Katie
Hello Katie,
it would be possible with the Media Source Extensions API which extends the HTML5 video in modern browsers (but not on iOS). So there is no solution which would fix it for all the browsers.
Besides it would be a lot of work and that technology is already used by the HLS.js library which FV Player uses to play HLS streams even in browsers which don’t support it natively. But as I mentioned it’s for HLS streaming format only, so you would need to re-encode your videos into that.
And since your MP4 streams are really using too much bitrate (3.5 Mbps for a 480p stream) it seems to just have to encode them again anyway.
The CDN would also be a big help, but I’m not sure how much in these rural areas.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Katie,
Martin’s right. Video files which are 1. too big and 2. not on a CDN are always going to stutter. Lower resolution files for streaming are just fine. It’s your masters for encoding to lower resolutions which have to be high quality.
You shouldn’t go directly from Lightworks to streaming. The Lightworks export should be an intermediary to send to an encoder or streaming host.
The cheapest way to get an online CDN and proper encoding for your videos is to sign up for a Vimeo Pro account (not the Business account they promote) at $20/month.
