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JW Player behavior on packet loss

Hello,

first a few words about our setup. We are live streaming via some self hosted wowza servers to JW Player 7. We are using mostly HLS but RTMP is also an option. The original stream is transcoded into 3 qualities, which are then embbeded in JW Player via adaptive bitrate. Overall the setup works quite well.

Recently we got some issue reports of users with unstable LTE internet connections. The problem usually seems to be packet loss every now and then, not the slow connection. Complains usually include something like "but I can watch youtube videos just fine".
Some simulated test cases indeed show youtube videos play just fine with some dropped packages (like 10%) on client side. Our stream in JW Player 7 however is stuttering or completely stops. Is there anything we can do on client (JW Player) side or maybe even on server (wowza) side to prevent this issue?

3 Community Answers

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Heidi

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

Packet loss would have to do with the network, not the player. The YouTube videos your viewers may be cached, and are being served via YouTube, so server location may come into it. Also, YouTube only streams in HTML5, so you won’t have that player handling multiple stream types. I would consult with Wowza to find out what you can do to minimize packet loss, for example, you may want to provide a lower bandwidth stream for your viewers with unstable network connections.

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w...

User  
0 rated :

Thank you for your response. I am well aware that packet loss is a network issue not a player issue. But how packet loss is handled, while watching a live stream, should be a topic that's discussed on player side. It seems like the player isn't really willing to retry downloading a HLS segment after not being able to download it in the first try, just as an example.

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Heidi

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

You may want to try re-instantiating your player after your video errors. Have you taken a look at creating custom functionality using our API? https://developer.jwplayer.com/jw-player/docs/developer-guide/api/javascript_api_reference/

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