Wowza Community

Randomly getting "Cannot load M3U8 errors"

Hello,

Using long duration mp4 files (up to 3 hours), with jwplayer 6. Some of our customers report getting “Cannot load M3U8: crossdomain access denied” errors sometimes, even if the next time they access the video it seems to be gone.

It may be important to know that in order to share port 80 on a single server, we are using an Apache vhost as local proxy to 1935 so that all HLS requests are proxied locally and served by Apache.

    RewriteRule ^/((open|send|idle|close|fcs)/.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}:1935/$1 [P]

When the error happens, we see this in the apache log:

[Wed Sep 17 18:34:07.700734 2014] [proxy_http:error] [pid 14909] (70014)End of file found: [client 131.220.117.101:57089] AH01102: error reading status line from remote server localhost:1935
[Wed Sep 17 18:34:07.700775 2014] [proxy:error] [pid 14909] [client 131.220.117.101:57089] AH00898: Error reading from remote server returned by /crossdomain.xml

So we thought we’d bypass this by serving the crossdomain.xml locally, and now it is a “Cannot load M3U8: 404 not found” error that jwplayer is showing.

We are suspecting that Wowza is too slow fragmenting the data; is Wowza supposed to block serving the crossdomain.xml file when remuxing a file ? We don’t see anything in the wowza error logs, absolutely nothing.

Hi,

This looks like an interesting and unusual problem. Can you post this to support@wowza.com including all the details here and a reference to this forum post. This will generate a ticket for you.

Please also provide the following if possible:

  • A ZIP file containing your conf/, logs/, transcoder/ and manager/logs folders. If you are not sure how to get this information please see the following tutorial. Please do make sure you provide logs which show Wowza server starting.

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-create-a-compressed-zip-file-in-windows-os-x-and-linux

  • If you have a live stream please outline the type of encoder in use along with the encoding settings for the stream. If you are using a .stream file to start restreaming please provide this.

  • If you have a on demand stream you may be asked to provide access to the content you are using for further testing. At this stage it is not required.

  • If you are using multiple bitrates (ABR) then please provide the SMIL file associated with your configuration.

Kind regards,

Paul

We are experiencing the same issue as the OP (sans the Apache layer). Restarting the WowzaStreamingEngine service seems to temporarily alleviate the issue but we’ve no idea what the root cause could be.

I am experiencing what I think is a similar issue, although without the Apache in the mix.

My Live HLS stream will play only on every other player reload. i.e. if the stream is playing and I reload the page then the browser will sit there waiting for the crossdomain.xml (Chrome network tab reports (pending…). If I refresh again the player will load. This situation will continue indefinitely loading on every other page refresh.

Exactly the same thing happens regardless which flash player I use (JW 6, flowplayer with flashls plugin, etc…)

If I hit the crossdomain.xml directly in the browser (http://wowza-server.com/crossdomain.xml) I see a similar issue. Except now after the fist load of the crossdomain.xml the browser will take 20s to re load the file. Changing the port (http://wowza-server.com:443/crossdomain.xml) will load the file but then back to 20s to reload.

I hope this information helps find a solution. Or if my situation is not related I’d appreciate any assistance in fixing my issue.

Cheers,

Tom

Hi,

I would suggest sending in a support request via the Wowza Account Portal. Please include the following information so that we can review your workflow and identify the issue.

[wowza-install-dir]/conf

[wowza-install-dir]/logs

[wowza-install-dir]/transcoder

If you are not sure how to get this information please see this tutorial.

Also, your encoder settings: (screenshots are helpful)

  • fps

  • keyframe rate

  • codec information (both video and audio)

  • bitrate sent to the Wowza Streaming Engine

And finally, your playback URL to review your player page.

We look forward to helping assist you in correcting this issue.

Regards,