Livestream Buffering / Playback Stopping

Developers Stream
1

Good afternoon,

I’m adding my voice too around livestream stopping & stuttering.

Using the iframe window or player dashboard gives the same issue.
Only seems to be impacting live inputs for me, on-demand playback behaves alright.

Streaming from OBS H264 @ 8000Kbps (Keyframe interval set to 2,4, 8s and auto with no difference), AAC 192kbps audio stream, Profile Main, High or None - no difference.

On fairly static content everything behaves as it should - the player builds up a nice buffer or around 25s and things work as expected.

Start sending something more lively to the stream however and things go wrong. The video starts playing ok, while it’s eating away at the held buffer until that runs out and things stop. Occasionally they’ll restart and stutter playback for a while before they stop completely.
CFS Player2

Interestingly, that behaviour is also the same when using the m3u8 manifest in another player, such as JWplayer.

From the look of the behaviour, it feels as if the live input re-encode or distribution isn’t happening quickly enough?

Video ingest is heading to the GB-EDI range (141.101.90.0), playback is also coming from the same (104.16.93.114) - latency is around 4ms.

Any advice would be appreciated, supposed to be using this for a corporate stream which worked in testing a few weeks ago… now, not so much.

3

An update on the above;

Oddly enough, the choice of encoder seems to make a difference to this despite both reporting equal performance, and no dropped frames.

Encoding h264 - CPU, 8000kbps CBR, veryfast preset, high profile, 3s GOP - results in playback issues as described above.

Encoding h264 Quicksync, 8000kbps, quality preset, high profile 3s keyframe, 3 B frames - functions perfectly.

I’ll stick to using QSV for now as for some unexplained reason, that works… slight drop in quality but at 8000k its not huge.