A customer uses HDS in a Flash HTTP Player and viewers of the on-demand videos are complaining about unstable stream. I tested this myself and can reproduce the problem; the video would play for a random number of seconds, then stop and hang for a few seconds, then continue. This may happen at any moment in the video (even in the beginning) so I figured this isn’t a buffering or bandwidth problem.
Whenever the problem occurs, a “seek” event is logged in the access log, even though I haven’t used seek or rewind. Occasionally I see that after the seek event, a “connect” and a “play” event are logged. I haven’t been able to find out when and why though.
I started the same stream from an RTMP Player and haven’t experienced the same problem; the stream runs smoothly from beginning to end.
Is there any explanation why HTTP streaming would be so unstable, while RTMP runs smooth?