Apple HLS not working on Apple devices

[Janez_Makovsek]

Dear Sir/Madam,

We upgraded to latest version of Wowza Streaming Engine and from all the devices and protocols, only Apple HLS on Apple devices is not working. There is only play sign with a line over it. The streams work everywhere else, Android, YT, FB, PC, but not on Apple Macs or Iphones. After some searching, we found the problem. The m3u8 contains unicode chars:

#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=SUBTITLES,GROUP-ID=“subs”,NAME="?eština",FORCED=NO,AUTOSELECT=YES,URI=“subtitlelist_lces_w718511941.m3u8”,LANGUAGE=“ces”

How can we fix that?

Thanks!
Atmapuri

[Rose_Power-Wowza_Com]

• Wowza Streaming Engine can make captions available to various players, however, only iOS devices using HLS (Cupertino) streaming support CEA-608 captions.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-configure-closed-captioning-for-live-streaming

This doc will show you the steps to make the necessary adjustments including the character guidelines. If you still have issues, please send us a support ticket and we’ll take a close look at what’s happening there.

[Janez_Makovsek]

Dear Rose,

Yes, I have submitted a ticket. Please note the presence of “?” and “š” in the “NAME” field of the playlist.m3u8 generated by Wowza, which cant possibly work with Apples Safari (which is not playing the video).

Never mind that on other platforms/players, the subtitle language name is garbled in the selection menu.

Kind Regards!
Atmapuri

[Rose_Power-Wowza_Com]

I see, yes we’ve had some customers run into a similar issue with characters like that. Let me see what I can find out while you wait for an engineer to respond to your ticket.

[Rose_Power-Wowza_Com]

Because of character limitations, 608 captions are limited to encoding in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, & Dutch. The two fields available in Line 21 allow for only two language options at a time.

Here is the doc for you that I’m sure an engineer will go over. Even though it says it’s for video-on-demand, this article unlike the other one above ,will show you how you can change the settings if the characters of a certain language aren’t recognized.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/How-to-configure-closed-captioning-language-selection-for-video-on-demand-streaming

[Janez_Makovsek]

Dear Rose,

The excerpt I posted is from playlist.m3u8. The NAME field is generated by Wowza server. This NAME is used only to allow the user the selection of the subtitle language in the player. We use WebVTT for the actual subtitle content, but this is not related to the issue here. The Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.8 is working fine. The problem was introduced with 4.8.12, because it started to translate English name of the Subtitle language in to native name, which uses also language specific characters. Currently our playlist.m3u8 contains “Czech” and “Croatian” for example, but with 4.8.12, it writes:

Čeština
Hrvatski jezik

instead. But of course, “Č” you wont see in the playlist.m3u8 text file. Most players will show garbled subtitle language selection (using ? etc… instead of Č). But for Safari specifically, it will also break the playback.

In the smil file itself we only specify:

textstream src=“OurStream” system-language=“eng, ces, hrv, hun, slv, rum”

It is Wowza Engine, which is expanding the “eng, ces, hrv, hun, slv, rum” when it is generating the actual playlist.m3u8. We have no option to influence, if the “ces” will be expanded to:

Čeština

(as done by Wowza version 4.8.12) or to

Czech

as done by Wowza version before 4.8.9.

Kind Regards!
Atmapuri

[Rose_Power-Wowza_Com]

Sorry for the delay in responding, I was out of office. That’s all very interesting info and I’m going to follow up on this with the engine team as far as why this is happening in 4.8.12.

I tried to search your support ticket for this, but couldn’t find one. Is it under a different name than this forums name? I’d like to see what was discussed with the engineers and what solution was given.

[Janez_Makovsek]

Dear Rose,

The ticket number is 389412. The bug was reproduced and forwarded to be resolved.

Thanks!
Atmapuri