Hello, Is there a concrete way that a player (using either Wowza player or FlowPlayer) that in our school, each class has a webpage with the player showing on a smartboard. When our “live” feed starts in our news production room, can every class player in each classroom start when the live feed starts? The only way i have found to do it, either do a “Pre-Roll” (but the player takes a long time to start to play), or is either use the REST API and get how many bytes, etc. have been passed, and then use JS to start the player. Both of those have different results and not always reliable. Is there something i am missing that would make this easier for our schools?
Hello @Andy Gillette, the pre-roll option may be the best bet… whether that is a looping school logo clip or whatever… the “long time to start to play” is likely the HLS chunk duration.
If you have the defaults in play, then there is easily 30+ seconds delay. See here:
https://www.wowza.com/blog/hls-latency-sucks-but-heres-how-to-fix-it
As far as the player polling for a valid 200 response with the m3u8, I do not believe Wowza Player would support and I am not certain on FlowPlayer or other custom options. It isn’t a clean/ideal option since you are essentially hitting the server over and over until something is there/ready.
The alternative would be to perhaps start the live stream and then force a refresh on the webpage across the organization.
example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1217929/how-to-automatically-reload-a-web-page-at-a-certain-time
