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yun22
Participating Frequently
March 23, 2010
Question

Dynamic Streaming video stutter.

  • March 23, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 1334 views

I have been beating my head against this problem for a while now and can't seem to find anyone else having the same issue.

When using Flash Media Live Encoder 3 to dynamically stream live video, the subscribing to it is "jumpy", for lack of a better term. I have no issues with swapping between bitrate streams on pre-recorded video, but when I use live feeds one of the streams seems corrupted. I've tried various bitrate settings and different people experience the video differently, but about half the time, one of the streams is all tiling and stuttering.

Example: If publishing 3 streams (200kb/s, 600kb/s, and 1200kb/s) and the bandwidth drops, causing a downshift from 1200 to 600, after the transition the 600 is in this weird stuttering 1 second loop and persists to do this until the dynamic stream requests a switch to one of the other streams.

I've tried reinstalling FMIS, FMLE and no matter what I do, there seems to be a 50/50 chance that a viewer will experience this. What's so weird to me, is I'll watch it in 2 separate player instances on the same machine and one of them gets the stuttering on the 600 stream and the other one doesn't.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Asa_-_FMS
    Adobe Employee
    Asa_-_FMS
    Adobe Employee
    March 24, 2010

    Hi yun,

    That does sound like a painful problem.  I'd like to ask some foundational questions before moving on to other things.

    1. Do you ever see the corruption when playing the stream without dynamic stream switching?

    2. Have you read this document on best practices for Dynamic Streaming?

    http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/dynstream_live.html

    Not that you would ever expect to encounter problems outside of best practices, but it's a good starting point for what you might be doing differently and could be leading to the problem in question.

    Let me know what you find and we can move forward from there.

    Asa

    Y
    yun22Author
    Participating Frequently
    March 25, 2010

    Asa, thank you kindly for your reply.

    No, playing the corrupted stream itself over a standard NetStream does not get jumpy. What's even weirder is that I can open 2 instances of my subscriber SWF at the same time, side by side on the screen and one of them will have the jumpy corruption and the other will operate just perfectly. They are watching the same set of feeds with the same params and flashvars. Absolutely no difference outside the code interpretations within Flash Player. Even on a few rare occasions one of the passing keyframes will correct the video stutter, but like I said that is rare.

    Yes, I have gone through the Best Practices doc many times to tweak my quality/bandwidth ratio.

    It's so tough to solve these types of intermittant problems when you can't force the issue to pop up and track down exactly where the cause is.

    Asa_-_FMS
    Adobe Employee
    Asa_-_FMS
    Adobe Employee
    March 25, 2010

    Understood, this is probably because there's some kind of problem in the video messages received after switching.  We'll need some debugging help to sort this out

    http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/495/cpsid_49588.html

    That Technote will show you how to activate live and netstream logging on your FMS.  Please activate both on all settings and reproduce the issue.  What we should get is a complete accounting for the messages and their types that are being sent in this case.  We should be able to use that accounting to figure out what's going on with the bad switch.

    Asa

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