HLS video quality switching and cookie based protection

Hello Kendell,

1) what Maria means is that while we were planning to support the cookie signatures to be able to deliver HLS streams more securely we ended up creating the Stream Loader feature of FV Player Pro.

One of the reasons is that the cookie signature is not supported by a lot of the CDNs – I only know it’s supported by AWS CloudFront. Another reason is that a single cookie would give you access to all the video files. The advantage is that the cookie is not so obvious – you can’t see it in the video link.

2) HLS quality switching speed might be affected by the segment duration.

However we did improve this in upcoming FV Player 7.5 – when I play the video on https://foliovision.com/player/demos/encrypted-hls-stream I get the 1080p version right away. When I play with slower internet, I get 480p. If I choose I want 1080p, then it’s remembered and that’s what I always get in my browser, even if my internet is slow and I have to wait – so no ABR (automated quality selection streaming)

We have the above routine even in the current FV Player, but it’s not 100% reliable.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kendell,

while we do not have an exact release date on the 7.5. version, it will be out in the next couple of days.

Making the web work for you,
Maria

Hello Kendel,

we will get to this. It’s not so easy though as the HLS.js library which we use for HLS playback if focused on providing reliable ABR so that the video quality is switched automatically. It doesn’t have the parameters to force a quality reliably.

You can try to enable the “Force HD Streaming” setting in FV Player.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kendel,

do you mean that the video takes longer to start playing? Or do you really mean that the player takes longer to appear?

If it’s the first case then it’s normal, it just takes more time to buffer the higher quality video file(s).

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kendell,

do you use the new setting Settings -> FV Player -> Integrations/Compatibility -> “Optimize FV Flowplayer JS loading” ?

Clould you please share some test page with us?

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kendell,

there are three issues –

1) because of the “Optimize FV Flowplayer JS loading” setting the player doesn’t appear until you start using the webpage as the dimensions are set to 100%. That way FV Player doesn’t know what aspect ratio should be used, but it assumes 16:9.

But I see we could fix that to work with the “Optimize FV Flowplayer JS loading”. In the meantime please set the player size to 1920 x 1080 in Settings -> FV Player Pro -> Sitewide FV Player Defaults and it will appear much better.

2) The transcript doesn’t appear – showing “Error loading trascript. Please try again in a minute. No transcript found”. Please try the latest FV Player Pro Beta: https://foliovision.com/player/basic-setup/switching-fv-player-pro-to-beta That one will hang on to the old cached transcript if it fails to load once. Previously a single failure would make the transcript disappear until it would be available again. So we improved that caching routine.

3) And last – the HLS stream is indeed quite slow to start. In my testing the first segment jbti6fli_2_0.ts took 30 seconds to load. But once I reloaded the page it only took 3 seconds to load. So perhaps your CDN is slow to pull the files. Actually I’m not sure if you media.c….gd server is a CDN or not.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Kendell,

there are three issues –

1) perhaps we should improve that optimization to only work for non-logged in users and only on the first load. Once the scripts are cached in browser it doesn’t make sense to delay their loading.

3) I was checking these video segment loading times in Google Chrome developer tools. You can get the same stats in Firefox or Safari. Just look at the Network tab of the browser developer console and play the video – you will see these video segments loading.

Thanks,
Martin