JW player messes up first few seconds of video every time

Hi, I’m not sure if my problem is Wowza related or JW player 5 related, as I am a new user of both.

However, JW’s demo stream that they use for advertising their own service always seems to work, whereas on the other hand, if I use longtailvideo’s “setup wizard” and either allow the player to access the stream using their own copies of the client files, or if I use the same setup on my own web server, in both cases I get the problem and it is roughly the same in both cases. So I will start by looking at Wowza.

The problem has occurred with every file I have tried so far. For test purposes I’ve used contant bit rates small enough not to be simply an issue with my own connection. I have tested H.264 mp4 files and also flv files, with identical behaviour in each case.

What happens is as follows:

  1. On pressing the player’s start button, the “spinning” icon appears for a couple of seconds.

  2. The player window goes blank for about half a second, then the spinning icon reappears, along with the JW Player icon, for a further few seconds.

  3. Usually, my video now starts to play, but it starts 4 seconds into the video. The time slider at the bottom of the player indeed jumps to the position reprsenting 4 seconds, and the numeric clock that is displayed jumps from 0:00 to 0:04 at the commencement of playing. (I have added the appropriate flash player to try to tell it to start at 0, but that makes no difference).

The above behaviour is the most frequent. Sometimes, however, one of the following variations occurs:

a) before the video starts playing (from the 4ths second of the video), a small part (maybe just one or a few frames) from somewhere in the first 4 seconds is displayed briefly.

b) a completely garbled image is displayed is displayed for a few seconds before the commencement from the 4ths second of the video.

Here is the code I’m using.

This text will be replaced

It works using the Wowza example player SimpleVideoStreaming:

Server: rtmp://skymousewow.webair.com:1935/streaming

Stream: mp4:ident1.mp4

Richard

Phil,

It’s not necessarily a replacement for JW player, unless you have Flash CS3 or CS4. But it is a good way to test. It seems to show that Wowza is setup correctly and that the video is okay, so you know that it is something to do with the way you have setup JW player, or possibly a problem with the player.

Also check out the latest developer build of JW player 5:

http://developer.longtailvideo.com/svn/trunk/fl5

Richard

Thanks, Richard. I will take a look at that example player and if it is sufficient for my needs I will use that for now, while persuing this as probably a JW Player issue.