Streaming crashes Firefox

[rob day]

I'm developing a video player which uses the FLVPlayback component and which is now being tested. We are finding that streaming clips will crash Firefox on some but not all PCs--looks like around 10%. I haven't seen it happen on a Mac. It appears to have something to do with streaming, because if I take one of the clips and progressively download it there's no crashing. For testing purposes I've eliminated any ActionScript, there's just the FLVPlayback component on the stage. Both the clips and the swf are running at 30 fps. I'm not encoding the flvs, but is there some setting in the encoding which might make the streaming clips more likely to crash a browser?

[Guest]

I am not sure what making firefox browser to crash @10%. Does this crash happens with a particular flash player plugin version.

If you think it is flash player or FMS streaming; it would a nice to report this as a bug with as much details as possible.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

[rob day]

Just to clarify, we've tested on 20 or so computers all running the most recent player plugin and 3 of the 20 always crash when the flv is streamed out of FIrefox. They never crash if the flv is a progressive download. I don't know that much about encoding flvs and obviously there are a lot of variables. Before I file a bug report, I'm wondering if anyone has an insight on whether the encoding settings the client is using could cause the streaming crash.

[rob day]

BTW, here is a link to the simple player:

http://www.latitudesurvey.com/LumiereVideoV2/StreamTest/

It would be very helpful if anyone out there could view this through FireFox on a PC and let me know what happens.

[Guest]

Nice video, I watched this on firefox 3.0.1 with Flash Player 10 beta. No crash observed.

I am not sure, but sometimes I have observed crashes while using a specific API and compiling with not so recent version of Flash authoring tool. many times it gets sorted with latest versions.

You might want to try out the sample VOD player (with source) that comes with FMS3 in folder samples/applications/vod/vodtest.swf;

[rob day]

Thanks for your help. We are using the most recent versions of Flash and the plugin. Unfortunately I'm not in control of the media server.

[robinff]

Testing with Firefox 3.0.1 and Flash WIN 9,0,124,0 the url http://www.latitudesurvey.com/LumiereVideoV2/StreamTest/ crashes if port 1935 is blocked (using Comodo personal firewall to block the port). We have the same problem and it started when we allowed fms to use port 80 as well as 1935.

e.g. ADAPTOR.HOSTPORT = :80,1935 In the c:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash Media Server 2\conf\fms.ini file.

Looking around some other flv streaming sites (e.g. bbc.co.uk/iplayer) it appears they are falling back to 8080 instead of 80 and then there is no crash. With port 1935 blocked the main adobe.com page is crashing about 1 in 3 refreshes. (Enter the world of Nevada Weir theme which uses port 1935 if available or 80 otherwise).

For us unblocking port 1935 on the client fixes the problem but the real cause seems to to be a Flash client/FLVPlayback bug.

[rob day]

Thanks, that sounds promising. I'll pass it on to the server people.