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cedricl81502404
cedricl81502404
Participant
February 1, 2019
Question

Adobe Flash stuttering

  • February 1, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 421 views

Hi, I’ve been trying to watch content from the WWE network but after a few minutes the video will start stuttering and then end up completely freezing. I’ve disabled hardware acceleration and it makes it worse. I’ve tried using Safari, Firefox and Chrome all with the same results. Here is what I have for specs:

Adobe Flash Player 32.0.0.114

MacBook Pro Late 2013

MavOS Mojave 10.14.2

I also just reimaged my laptop and the problem is still present.

Any help would be appreciated.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    February 1, 2019

    Youtube has a great explanation of how video gets delivered to you:

    Google Video Quality Report

    It sounds like you can't download the stream fast enough for it to play interrupted for you.

    That problem may be in your house -- like if you're on WiFi, try a wired connection.  If the problem goes away, you need to deal with wifi coverage / radio interference in your house.

    It might be between you and your ISP.  If speedtest.net says your connection is pretty fast, then that leg of the connection is probably fine.

    It might be between your ISP and however many other networks traffic has to traverse between the WWE's video servers and your ISP.  That one is hard to troubleshoot from where you sit.  Your ISP would have visibility into the route, any bottlenecks, and has some options for augmenting interconnectivity or routing around bottlenecks in the path, but the first-tier technical support person you get on the phone isn't going to have a lot of say in that kind of stuff.

    The WWE has a big stake in their traffic getting to you efficiently, and they generally pay a Content Distribution Network (CDN) to host those videos on thousands of geographically distributed servers, in order to minimize the physical distance between you and the video, with the goal of avoiding bottlenecked routes by keeping the routes short.  They also have visibility into the routes the video traffic takes, and they get a lot of aggregate performance data back from their video servers.


    Either this is a transitory problem that will go away on it's own, or it won't.  If that's the case, you might be able to use a cheap VPN service to change the location where your traffic emerges (you're basically making your own detour around congested traffic), or you could start shopping around for an ISP that better meets your needs.

    cedricl81502404
    cedricl81502404Author
    Participant
    February 1, 2019

    Hi, thanks for the reply. It’s not a problem with my Internet speed. I can easily play the WWE content on my iPad. Watching HD content on Netflix is also not a problem on the laptop.

    Sent from my iPhone

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    February 1, 2019

    The video stream for iPad is definitely going to be different than the one served for Flash, but it's a useful data point.  My iPad has way worse WiFi reception than my Macbook does, so we can probably rule out WiFi.

    It's hard to say without looking at the network traffic that the stream for iOS and the stream for Flash are coming from the same set of servers or taking the same route, and there aren't really great diagnostics that you can run (WWE is getting performance data back in their aggregate metrics), so I can't really give you a definitive diagnosis.

    What I can tell you, is that I'm not aware of a widespread problem with Adobe Access/DRM video streams on MacOS.  The only post I find in Google with "WWE hang flash" is this one.  I'm not seeing any recent complaints about DRM video on the forums, and we're not really making changes on that front.  All of that code is pretty mature.

    I don't think it's your laptop either, and I believe that you're seeing the issue.  We do a lot of testing with Hulu (which also uses Adobe's DRM technology) and I'm not seeing bugs come in about playback problems there.  There may be some nuanced difference in how they encode their videos that means that their streams aren't encountering this issue, but there aren't great diagnostics that I can get from your machine.  The technical logs live on the video server, and WWE and the Adobe Access teams have visibility into that stuff.

    I'll try and find a reproducible example that I can point the DRM folks to, but there's no magic bullet here that's going to have you walking away with a fix today.  It's either a bug that the DRM folks need to fix, which means that it's weeks or months before it would actually ship in a Flash update, or (assuming its a code-level issue), it's something that WWE might be able to work around with a tweak on the server side to avoid whatever encoding feature is tickling this problem code.

    The thing that I would highly recommend is to complain directly to WWE.  The WWE has a direct engineering channel to the DRM team, and they're best positioned to diagnose and fix whatever the underlying issue is.

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