EC2 + Wowza + Wirecast: Can anyone help troubleshoot sound issues?

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

I can’t find out what causes these frequent stops/delays/freezes in the sound. As such the video seem to be playing alright.

Wirecast 5 (CPU-load 30 %) ADDED

25 fps / keyframe every 50 frames

832x468

1200 kbit video

320 kbit stereo aac

to

EC2 c1.medium at eu-west-1c. ADDED

CPU-load: 1.5% ADDED

rtmp://54.194.190.221/cloudfront/amazonmicro

or

http://54.194.190.221:1935/cloudfront/amazonmicro/playlist.m3u8

The m3u8 stream can be seen here: http://jn.kundemappe.dk/amazon_ec2/enterprise/

Note that even though the stream name suggest a CloudFront distribution, it is not. The URL is directly to the Wowza server.

2

Hi,

This seems to play just fine from where I am (audio and video). How often do you experience the audio problems?

All the time or just occasionally? At certain times of the day perhaps?

Daren

3

I have had the same experience with wirecast 5, we found an issue with the black-magic intensity pro card and wirecast 5. nothing to date had been resolved by telestream.

4

Hi,

You may want to look at the Troubleshooting Article, it shows these messages and possible fixes.

Cause: Generally this indicates an encoder issue. It also could be an issue when the machine CPU utilization or GPU utilization is maximized. To debug, see How to debug AAC or MP3 timecode issues with cupertino packetization. Try using Advanced Stream Monitor to monitor the streams and reset them if they become unhealthy. If you see this message immediately after the stream is published before packetization starts, it can be ignored.

You would also try adding a sort buffer to the application which may give Wowza enough time to align the timecodes before streaming.

How to fix unaligned video and audio with a server side sort buffer

Jason

5

All the time basically. With 5-10 seconds intervals. Sometimes 20-30 seconds intervals. Rarely do I get to stream 1 min + wihtout the sound “popping”. It’s just for 100 - 200 ms or so, but it very easy to hear.

It’s the same for m3u8 and rtmp playback via flash on my MacBook. Same on Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Can it be related to the errors found in the log?

CupertinoPacketHandler.handlePacket[cloudfront/_definst_/amazonmicro]: 
Timecode out of order [video]: 1602240:1602280
CupertinoPacketHandler.handlePacket[cloudfront/_definst_/amazonmicro]: 
Timecode out of order [video]: 726960:727000
HTTPStreamerAdapterCupertinoStreamer.onPlaylist: 
Stream not found [cloudfront/amazonmicro/chunklist.m3u8]: amazonmicro
CupertinoPacketHandler.handlePacket[cloudfront/_definst_/amazonmicro]: 
Timecode out of order [video]: 9731080:9731120
6

I think the issue lies in the combination of Wirecast and the video-material it plays. It is a high-quality .mov file, and it seems that whatever settings I use in Wirecast and at the Wowza server, it simply wouldn’t play back correctly.

I exported an .mp4 from Premiere CS6 and imported it in Wirecast. Now the sound is smooth. There is still some occasional stuttering, but it very rare and certainly much less than with the .mov file.