Wowza Community

Android 4.1.* erratic behaviour with AAC audio via HLS

Hello everyone, we are experimenting some strange behaviour related to a class of Android devices namely the Samsung Galaxy S2/3.

We have tested our streaming with those two devices:

Samsung S2 model GT-I9100

android: 4.1.2

kernel 3.0.31-889555

Samsung S3 model GT-I9300

android: 4.1.2

kernel 3.0.31-742798

We stream 128kbps 48k AAC audio in mp4 format via HLS inside a native app that uses the MediaPlayer std library.

Everything goes smooth and fine on iOS and the vast majority of Android that supports HLS but on these two devices (and on others similar as well) the phone freezes while some process loops indefinitely in background (trying to decode the stream I think) leading eventually to the OS asking to kill the application.

Sometimes on identical devices, with the same OS and kernel version everything works seamlessly.

I’m quite lost, Wowza’s logs shows that the servers answers 200 OK.

Is there any caveat in encoding the AAC files for Android? (e.g. a particular library, a particular bitrate or framerate, 44.1k instead of 48k…), the documentation of the SDK is vague to say the least in this regard, maybe anyone here has come on the same issue before.

TIA and regards, Carlo

Carlo,

I’m not sure how to help. Android devices are so diverse and major changes in OS support for streaming have been problematic. rtsp streaming is what we recommend to work across Android devices

Richard