I could swear I read something in the release notes for Wowza 2 that referenced the ability to detect if a client had fallen behind a certain latency threshold on a live flash stream and then catch the client up to real-time. I’m looking through documentation but can’t find anything now. Anyone remember hearing this?
Maybe you are thinking of the QoS (Quality of Service) metrics of the NetStream.info object. You can read about that in these articles:
Dynamic streaming in Flash (part 1)
Dynamic streaming in Flash (part 2)
Dynamic streaming in Flash (part 3)
Richard
This is a feature we will investigate for a future release. We have no definitive timeframe.
Charlie
I don’t think this has a server-side aspect. I think it is all client-side, because other items specify that FMS is required.
Richard
We are very interested in this capability also. I have tried setting the buffer to zero on the client, and the video stutters and blinks badly on any but the best internet connections and fastest computers on the streaming and client sides.
Setting the buffer to anything greater than zero causes the slowly growing lag issue. When streaming live cameras, a lag time of 20 minutes or more behind “real time” can be a real problem.
I got some problem. Is there any solution now? thanks
I have noticed that with the latest Flash Player (I currently have 11,2,202,233) that we see a fast-forward catch-up phenomenon when the live window is minimized and later restored. Our Flash Player has the following parameters set:
bufferTime: 1.5,
bufferTimeMax: 5.0,
However even with these settings, the stream can still fall behind by several hours. However it will use the fast-forward feature to catch up to the current time, and I presume, will bring the buffer down to the bufferTime value. I have not been able to verify the actual lag time after the catching up process is complete. We have not upgraded the Wowza server to obtain this effect–only the clients. We are currently running Wowza version 3.0.3.
If you have the latest Flash player, you can verify the behavior by minimizing the streaming window, then restoring it after 15-30 seconds. You will see the video play in accelerated mode until the player has played all of the frames in the buffer.
We also set our encoding software to “drop frames” rather than reduce quality when the connection is poor, so that we stay as close to real time as possible.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Wowza. It’s the Flash Player for sure. There is no way it should buffer 2 hours of data when the bufferTimeMax param is set to 5 seconds. Wowza is just streaming what’s sent, in real time. FP was supposed to do this catch-up thing as of 10.1, but we’ve only noticed it in the last few weeks.
I 've tested this with Wowza and it doesn’t work.
Obviusly it works only with FMS.
The spec also says the following:
[HTML]
Set the bufferTimeMax property to enable live buffered stream catch-up in the following cases:
•Streaming live media from Flash Media Server.
•Streaming live media in Data Generation Mode (NetStream.appendBytes()).
[/HTML]
more at
Obviously there must be something done on the server too
This would be great if we could use this feature !
Richard, I appreciate. I realized what I had seen was actually in the list of updates Adobe listed as part of the 10.1 player.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.html
The item labeled “Buffered stream catch-up” notes the functionality I’m interested in. This seems to be a player feature but I’m imagining this requires some server-side functionality. Have you heard anything about it?
I do not think we have a way to fix this. It sounds the Flash Player may have changed the way it works. We are doing some testing with the latest 11.2 version as there have been some reports of different behavior after upgrading, nothing conclusive yet with our testing. Possibly behavior could be changed in future versions of Flash Player, but I don’t have insight into that.
-Lisa
I got some problem. Is there any solution now? thanks
Has anyone found a solution for falling behind? On some rtmp video, my clients can fall 2 minutes behind live in just 5 minutes.