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Playlist bug / issue with HLS

Hello,

we came across the following issue. We have a livestream that is running with HLS chunks in JW Player. All fine. But when the encoder does for what reason a fast reconnect (within 2-3 secomds) on our Wowza sever, we see the following playlist sequence. And that causes the JW Player to buffer / get stuck. The playlists are still downloaded, but the chunks are not.

Here are the playlists that is causing this in chronological order

Playlist 1:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:12
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:1399
#EXTINF:10,
media-uuo0aiirn_1399.ts
#EXTINF:10,
media-uuo0aiirn_1400.ts
#EXTINF:11,
media-uuo0aiirn_1401.ts

Playlist 2:
#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:12
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:1403
#EXTINF:10,
media-uuo0aiirn_1403.ts

Playlist 3:
#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:12
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:1403
#EXTINF:10,
media-uuo0aiirn_1403.ts
#EXTINF:11,
media-uuo0aiirn_1404.ts

playlist 4:
#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:12
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:1403
#EXTINF:10,
media-uuo0aiirn_1403.ts
#EXTINF:11,
media-uuo0aiirn_1404.ts
#EXTINF:10,
media-uuo0aiirn_1405.ts

Playlist 5:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:12
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:1404
#EXTINF:11,
media-uuo0aiirn_1404.ts
#EXTINF:10,
media-uuo0aiirn_1405.ts
#EXTINF:10,
media-uuo0aiirn_1406.ts


As you can see, the stream was just running. So playlist 1 is normal. But then the encoder is somehow restarting/reconnecting. Then we get playlist 2. So there you can see we are missing 1 chunk, but the playlist only contains 1 chunk.

10 sec later, we get the playlist nr3. Which holds two chunks. Again 10 sec later we get playlist nr4. Which looks good.

But as soon as playlist 2 is read by JW Player, the player get confused somehow and starts buffering infinity. Is this normal? The playlists are available and do not generate a 404 error. So I would expect that the player will still try to download and play the chunks in the playlist, even there is a gap.

Kind regards
Joshua

7 Community Answers

Up Down

Todd

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

Hi Joshua,

Are you able to reproduce this behavior any time the manifests are a little unusual? If we can reliably reproduce unexpected behavior, then we can escalate it to our engineers.

Kind regards,
Todd

Up Down

Joshua

User  
0 rated :

Yes,

If you use wirecast, and press disconnect and connect again, we sill it all the time. I do not know how much time this can be, but at least 2 a 3 seconds between disconnect and connect will trigger this event. I guess when there is more then 10 seconds in between, it will behave different.

So yes, this can be reproduced with a wowza server and wirecast (demo version).

Up Down

Joshua

User  
0 rated :

Euh,

I see some strange sentences. But we can reproduce this all the time when we disconnect and connect again in Wirecast withing 2-3 seconds.

Up Down

Todd

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

I would expect our player to handle these scenarios more gracefully. Would it be possible to schedule a time for us to load your stream and you can disconnect and reconnect, etc?

Up Down

Joshua

User  
0 rated :

That is not handy. I expect that you test JW Player with your own Wowza server. I expect that you do those tests, to see if the player is compatible with Wowza.

Also, this happens within 30 seconds. So I guess that this has to be tested like multiple times. So I think it is way easier for you to just to setup your own free (developer) wowza server with free Wirecast. Then you can see this issues yourself, and can make some tests yourself. I am not able to schedule a complete day off to test this with you guys.

I see this as a bug that should be fixed. I have described how to reproduce. I expect that you make a setup, confirm this issue and use that setup also to fix this issue.

Up Down

Todd

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

I do not have access to our Wowza server, nor am I familiar with how to use Wowza to recreate your issue.

I will forward this thread to our engineers to see if they have enough details here to reproduce this.

Up Down

Todd

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

We are not hearing about this same problem from any other customer. Can you test the same in the JW8 beta to see if the same thing happens?

I also propose that we schedule a time to test this on our side as those fast reconnects happen?

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