Google TV and HLS streaming

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hi,

Our HLS live streams (live, not on-demand) play fine on iOS, Roku and Android 4 phones.

However, when playing on Google TV, the stream appears to load the first chunk, then it dies (player acts like it’s playing… but screen is blank with no audio)

Any idea why the live stream would start to play, then die?

http://media2.tripsmarter.com:1935/LiveTV/BTV/playlist.m3u8

Our on-demand streams from Wowza play fine on Google TV and the live streams are encoded at identical settings as on-demand.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Steve

2

We’re having the exact same issue. Been testing with 3-4 different Google TV manufacturers, only first chunk plays.

If I remember correctly, we didn’t have this issue with the first gen Google TV from Logitech.

Will test this more this week, but if anyone have any pointers it’d be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

/M

3

The mechanism for playing a live and vod stream are very different. For vod the playlist.m3u8 is complete. It contains all available chunks. For live the playlist only shows the most recent 3 chunks. The player is required to continue to poll the playlist to get the updated list of available chunks. It could be that the Google TV player just does not do this properly. It can handle vod but has not implemented the portion that reloads the playlist data for live streaming.

BTW, we have done limited testing on Google TV. When we have more information we will post back to this thread.

Charlie

4

We haven’t resolved it, yet… had to move on to more important projects. If anyone makes progress on this, please post here and we’ll do the same. Hoping to pick back up on this project mid-2013.

5

That makes perfect sense, especially considering I have not seen an example of live streaming on Google TV.

It’s been a few months since I looked, but we may try Google TV Dev support and see if we can get an answer.

Thanks for the help.

6

Although it looks like they claim to support HLS live:

https://developers.google.com/tv/android/articles/hls

  1. Live streaming is supported (more in a longer article).

(but I can’t find the longer article…)

7

We upgraded to 3.5.2 this week and had gotten a couple of upgrades to the Google TV boxes as well. It now plays on beyond the first 10 seconds (only crashes around 45 minute mark or so, but I’d bet that this is fixable), but we’re having some nasty artifact issues, quite frequent. Haven’t been able to find any information by googling on this.

Here’s the debug from the google tv box:

[ 03-13 15:27:52.583 678:0x249 W/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

** empty vid_meta!!!

[ 03-13 15:27:52.643 678:0x2f1 E/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

!! PE’s result check pointer is null line = 536

[ 03-13 15:28:06.023 678:0x249 W/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

** empty vid_meta!!!

[ 03-13 15:28:06.113 678:0x2f1 E/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

!! PE’s result check pointer is null line = 536

[ 03-13 15:28:16.013 678:0x249 W/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

** empty vid_meta!!!

[ 03-13 15:28:16.083 678:0x2f1 E/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

!! PE’s result check pointer is null line = 536

[ 03-13 15:28:26.053 678:0x249 W/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

** empty vid_meta!!!

[ 03-13 15:28:26.083 678:0x2f1 E/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

!! PE’s result check pointer is null line = 536

[ 03-13 15:28:46.033 678:0x249 W/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

** empty vid_meta!!!

[ 03-13 15:28:46.103 678:0x2f1 E/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

!! PE’s result check pointer is null line = 536

[ 03-13 15:29:13.663 678:0x249 W/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

** empty vid_meta!!!

[ 03-13 15:29:13.743 678:0x2f1 E/MVBerlinVideoEngine32 ]

!! PE’s result check pointer is null line = 536

8

Lots of spam once it stopped / crashed, ran out of buffer… but buffer was full with the following:

[ 03-13 16:15:11.753 521:0xb37 W/AVAPIFFmpegPlayerCore ]

Underflow detected. Just queued audio with PTS 36381019666666, but clock reads 36381034147666. Stopping clock in order to rebuffer.

[ 03-13 16:15:11.753 447:0x1c5 W/MediaPlayer ]

info/warning (701, 0)

[ 03-13 16:15:11.753 447:0x1c6 W/MediaPlayer ]

info/warning (1, 0)

[ 03-13 16:15:11.753 447:0x206 W/MediaPlayer ]

info/warning (702, 0)

[ 03-13 16:15:11.753 678:0x2f5 W/Berlin@@MOD_AVS ]

[AVS] Audio Stream[0] STC reached, starting play, STC45k = 0x6194dd37, RdPts45k = 0x6194dd1c!

9

I got this answer by Krispy on SO: This is a firmware bug on the device. You will not be able to work around this right now. Internal bug filed - you will need to wait for an update.