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Video packet list is full

What does this message mean? It seems like transcoding stops after this message; the stream still runs but all transcodes show black screen and no audio. The machine is dual Xeon E5 with NVidia K4200. We’re running 7 channels, each of which is transrated to 4 bitrates. The CPU is around 40% and the GPU around 10%, memory usage around 15%

TranscoderSessionVideo.addPacket[_defaultVHost_:live/_definst_/channel1.stream] Video packet list is full: size:7200 limit:7200

Hello there.

This message indicates a problem on the decode side of the Transcoder. Packets are coming in from the source but are not being handled properly by the decoder. Once it gets to the limit, it stops adding new packets to the decoder. Are you seeing any other log messages that may indicate the source of the problem?

Kind regards,

Salvadore

Thanks for your answer. I’ve taken a few days to do more testing, and I’m pretty sure that this is not because the server’s overloaded. We experience the same problems when we run only 2 channels. I updated to Wowza 4.1.1 and the newest NVidia drivers (340.65) but without any improvement.

If this is a problem on the decode side: the input is an 7mbps h.264/AAC stream coming from FFMPEG. Originally the stream comes from satellite, but the local provider uses some strange DVB receiver cards that only can output HTTP, so we use ffmpeg to convert the HTTP stream to RTMP (the audio is converted to 128k AAC in the same ffmpeg process)

Is there any chance that ffmpeg spits out more packages than the Transcoder Add-On can decode? Sounds strange to me …

Pretty sure it’s not a bandwidth problem either; we pull 2 streams @7mbit each over a gbit LAN.

Thanks for your time, I’ve already filed a support case with Wowza.

Thank you for your reply Zoran. I’ve already an active support case with ticket #112427, feel free to check there (I assume you have access). I’ve experienced the same problem with only 2 streams enabled. I know the performance benchmark. Remember that this is a K4200, not the K4000 or K5000 - there’s significant difference in computing power. Nevertheless, with only two channels running, a CPU usage of 10-15% and a GPU usage of 2-3%, I can’t imagine this is because of overload.

Next thing I’ll try, is to disable the GPU and just use the software transcoder.

Hi,

Can you also try enabling only 2 output streams for each transcoded channel? Do you get similar results?

You can also see the performance results in the “Wowza Transcoder AddOn performance benchmark” forum article where the “NVIDIA Quadro K5000” video card was used for GPU acceleration.

Zoran

With a 7mbps incoming stream, I would be curious if this is a bandwidth issue?

Sorry I do not have more to add. If you want to have the support team take a closer look you can open a support ticket.

Kind regards,

Salvadore