HLS streams holding layout hostage on client? RTSP and HLS not working as expected

[alexm]

Hey folks,

I have a peculiar behaviour on the Android v2 player. I have a layout that incorporates 3 HLS streams. 1 is a ‘native’ HLS stream, the other 2 are RTSP webcams that are transcoded on the fly by a Linux server into HLS and then published to Xibo. (Yes, I used to run native RTSP from the Local Video plugin but for some reason that stopped working when I upgraded my NVR software).

Now, all is well and the layout works like a charm when the 2 locally generated HLS streams are working fine and when they are not, the picture is simply not updated, which is also fine (you know it when you see the midnight webcam view at 11am). For your information: my layout has 19 regions: 5 clocks, 1 layout item, 4 text items, 2 embedded webpages, 3 HLS streams, 2 RSS tickers and 2 embedded HTML functions.

But when the HLS streams crash for some reason, the whole layout stops loading. At first I thought it may be a bug in the player software so I updated to the latest Android build (206) but that did not change the behaviour. When I killed my FFMPEG conversion process on the converting Linux server, the whole layout suddenly came to life and all regions were loading again.

Is this a caching thing? Is this something else? I have no clue.

FYI: I’m running Xibo installed on a Linux VM in an Apache config. The current server version I’m running is 2.3.1 ( i noticed there is a 2.3.4). The current Android client version is v2 206.

I’m thankful for all suggestions

Kind regards,
Alex

[alexm]

There’s another remarkable thing: the HLS stream I use from an external source is perfectly fine using the HLS plugin. The local stream however, refuses to play via the HLS plugin. It needs the local video plugin. Now at first I thought “this may be an android thing”, but if that would be the case, how come the external stream is working? Android seems perfectly fine streaming HLS using the HLS plugin, just not MY HLS.

So, in short: The RTSP stream does not work in the local video plugin, the HLS stream does not work in the HLS plugin, the HLS stream DOES work in the local video plugin, but when it crashes, the whole layout hangs. When I open both the RTSP stream and the HLS stream in VLC, both play just fine.

The HLS converted stream has 1 big drawback: it has more than 30 seconds delay, meaning the surveillance cam isn’t live streaming any more. I’m not sure if this is caused by the conversion (likely) or by the plugin but it is annoying, especially because the streams seem to work fine. They just don’t play nice with Xibo.

On a sidenote: I just upgraded the server install to 2.3.4, so both server and client are on the most recent version.

Edit: As it looks like this is not an Android issue, I’ve moved the post to the CMS Features and Functionality group.