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Multi-bitrate HLS streaming from Amazon S3 with .smil

Hi, I have an iOS app and JWPlayer on the web site that stream videos from S3 via Wowza(latest version of the Engine) vods3 app with media cache set up for S3, using .smil file(stored on S3)

Streaming works for the most part, but I have a couple of issues:

  1. Smil file caching: apparently, the .smil file is cached in the MediaCache. The problem is that if I change the .smil file on S3(or even delete it), the only way for the iOS app to see the changes is TO RESTART THE WHOLE STREAMING ENGINE. Restarting vods3 app does not work. I’m guessing that disabling and re-enabling the MediaCache will also work, but that still does not seem appropriate.

  2. When iOS app streams with HLS, I have playback issues that don’t seem to happen when streaming via RTMP(JWPlayer). It seems that HLS always starts with the highest bitrate and then chokes and switches down and when that happens, the video in the app stops for a couple of seconds and then resumes, sometimes with artifacts. When I watch the Monitoring for the vods3 app in Wowza Engine Manager, the start “out” bitrate is very high for HLS, 10 to 17 Mbps and then jumps down, usually at the same time the playback problems occur.

Anyone has any insights for this?

My .smil file contents:

For purging certain item from cache, here’s a small article:

https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-purge-an-item-from-the-cache-mediacache

Regarding slowness moments… I suppose you’re having problems with initial fetching of metadata for each video, probably salvadore will comment more here.

As a probable solution, i was building the tool to force pre-load metadata (by requesting first chunks) of some multibitrate video on HTTP request.

s3 is not so fast as we want it to be… IMHO.