Audio drops and out of sync with Vidiu encoder

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hello!

I am using the Teradek Vidiu Encoder and Video quality is quite fine, however there are some problems with the Audio.

Every 3-4 minutes there is a drop in the audio of about 5 seconds while the video stream keeps playing on.

I think it comes from missing timecodes in the source stream as also the A/V goes out of sync in HLS clients. RTMP clients are fine with synchronicity but also experience drops.

Unfortunately the Vidiu does not have an option to embed timecode or even set the keyframe interval.

How can I analyze the stream and find out if timecode is embedded and what the keyframe interval is.?

And how can I debug this on the Wowza and maybe tune it.

I used the FMLE before we went to HD streaming via SDI or HDMI and we never had such problems. This free software is better than many hardware encoders.

thanx,

Stephan

2

Update:

I tried enabling the AAC/MP3 debugging, but no output showed up.

The I configured the packet sort buffer which caused even more troubles even in the video stream.

Right now I am using AverCaster HD Duo which gives much better does not give the audio drops and it also is synchronous. Can anybody explain what is behind this?

I am really fed up with all those hardware encoders and so are also all my users, they never experienced such problems for many years.

I am close to going back to FMLE with a capture card.

thanx,

Stephan

3

Hi,

I regret to hear that you’ve experienced issues with Teradek Vidiu encoders and disappointment with Teradek’s sales team.

I’ve passed on your feedback internally to the Works With Wowza team so this can be discussed and hopefully resolved as soon as possible.

Thanks for the feedback.

Regards,

Jason

4

We are having reliability issues using Teradek with Wowza S.E. 4. Its bad because streams get into a corrupted state and don’t recover on their own. We have to manually intervene frequently.

We have about six Teradek Vidiu and Vidiu Pro. Our streamers publish from the field over 4G. They are mobile, so their connections can bounce on tower hand-off and 4G network conditions. We are seeing occurrences where the audio or video may not be present in players after a Teradek reconnect. Teradek and Wowza act as everything is fine ( nothing noteworthy in logs), but we are missing either the audio or video on the stream on probably 10% of the Teradek reconnects. It doesn’t recover on its own, so we have to have someone manually monitor and use the ‘live’ application reset button in Wowza Streaming Manager to force reconnect and hope they occur with both audio & video streams. With 3 active streamers, this has to be done about once every 20 minutes or more. We had much better results using FMLE and Wowza 3.5 in this case until we switch to Wowza S.E. 4 and using mostly all Teradek Vidiu for convenience.

5

Plus Teradek has a very rude sales person that treated me like dirty, because I only bought three vidiu(s) instead of a bulk order.

I think Wowza needs to stop promoting the Teradek Vidiu. Wowza has a very good product and I hate to see them ruin their reputation via association.

We’ve had similar experience from Teradek staff. They also seem to blow off their quality problems and are slow if not resistant to fixing them. About 3 of our 6 Teradeks in the last 18 months had failed from manufacturing defects. The Vidiu Mini was a quality disaster for Teradek. Go read the reviews on B&H for that one. But for now, they are the only company with a compact stand alone encoder line, but I expect that to change as is there is room for someone to do a much better job in this space in both quality, service, and likely price.

6

With the Vidiu I used the analog input because vie HDMI we experienced constant drops.

The App is not very useful for monitoring the stream, it needs a fast WiFi.

stream is stable now with Avercaster via HDMI for Video+Audio at a even higher bitrate than Vidiu

BTW: Does anybody have experience with NewTek Tricaster?

Stephan

7

I tried enabling the AAC/MP3 debugging, but no output showed up.

Hi Stephen,

The AAC/MP3 debugging only shows up when you are running Wowza in standalone mode from the command line. It doesn’t go into the log files.

Roger.

8

Hi Stephan,

how the audio got to the encoder? through the HDMI or sound port?

AFAIK there is an application run on iphone or android that can monitor the streaming in vidiu, have you tried it?

9

I’m having the same issue. The Video freezes in 20 seconds after publishing the stream to my standalone wifi server. The Vidiu is definitely the issue. I have used three different Vidiu on my LAN with both the wowza server and the vidiu connected directly to my CISCO 1941 ISR over FE ports. I still get video/audio out of sync. Plus the web interface freezes a lot when starting and stopping the stream.

It’s only when I stream from a DVD player (Sony BDP-S570) that I get a good stream. I don’t think the Vidiu can handle encoding the raw video and since a DVD is already encoded it not an issue.

I have two separate networks from Comcast - Home and Business. I tried streaming from my home to the business and that did not work. I also tried from two customer location before directly connected the vidiu to the same router as the Wowza server.

Plus Teradek has a very rude sales person that treated me like dirty, because I only bought three vidiu(s) instead of a bulk order.

I think Wowza needs to stop promoting the Teradek Vidiu. Wowza has a very good product and I hate to see them ruin their reputation via association.

Here are my spec(s):

Vidiu Firmware 2.0.1 , Connect type HDMI (audio and Video), RJ-45 connection, DHCP and RTMP streaming at HD/AAC/MP3

core server - VM HOST - 4 VMs (2 DCs, 1 Web, 1 wowza): 6 core 2.10GHz intel E5-2620, 32 GB mem, 2 TB HDD

Wowza Server - VM Guest resource allocation: 1 processor with 2 cores, 8 GB Mem, 160GB HDD, Bridged FE port NIC

comcast Biz Class network speed: 9.35 Up and 56.53 Down

ifiniti Home Broadband speed: 12.20 Up and 17.81 Down

I have one live 640x360 stream that runs 24 hours a day at a Averaging 9 frame per sec / 126 Kbps Audio and 206 Video

10

Hello,

Sorry to hear you are having this issue. I would make sure you are using supported audio codecs:

Wowza Streaming Engine Supported Formats

and if so, I would recommend opening a support case with the below info for further review:

[install-dir]/conf

[install-dir]/logs

[install-dir]/transcoder

[install-dir]/manager/logs

If you are not sure how to get this information please see the following tutorial.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-create-a-compressed-zip-file-in-windows-os-x-and-linux

Best,

Jason

11

I have tried using a lower Bit Rate but the problem still occurs. I am using the analogue audio input. I upload the videos to Youtube live. This problem is super frustrating. It renders the videos unusable