We’re using Wowza as an origin server to Akamai’s progressive media download CDN. We feed Wowza with H.264 video and AAC audio. We’re able to successfully view Cupertino and Adobe HDS streams directly from our Wowza server. When we begin pushing traffic through Akamai the Adobe HDS stream continues to work great. However, the Cupertino stream pauses or stops completly after 30-40 seconds. We’re currently working on the issue with Akamai. I was curious if the Wowza community had any best practices and or potential suggestions for delivering live media through a CDN using progressive media downloads.
Best regards,
Matt
That’s great! Thanks for the detailed update
Richard
Richard,
Thanks for your prompt response. We’ve actually solved the issue. It appears it was just a simple lack of understanding on our part. The issue was that by default the PMD service was setup to cache .m3u8 and .ts files for 5 minutes. By default Wowza generates chunklist.m3u8 files with a default chunk size of 10 seconds and only 3 chunks per chunk list. Therefore, there was only 30 seconds of media to playback and when fetching the new chunk list file before playback ended it would just retrieve the previous chunk list because it was still cached on Akamai for another 3-4 minutes. In any event, we increased the number of chunks, number of chunks to the edge to push the amount of playback per chunk list to greater than the 5 minutes of cache time for for the chunk list file on Akamai. We’ve proved that this now works and plays consistently. The next step is adjusting the Akamai cache, and Cupertino streaming configuration (chunks, chunk list, repeater chunk count) to minimize load on our Wowza instances and also cache as much as possible on the CDN.
Thanks!