Wowza Community

Recorder APPEND problems on stream dropouts

When recording a live stream, whenever the stream drops (eg. because of poor network conditions), the recorder stops. When the connection is established again, and the stream picks up, the recorder starts recording again. Since I have the versioning on APPEND the recorder uses the same file to add the video. But this causes various problems, and seldom goes right. Experienced issues:

  • First half of the recording (before the dropout) is 90% artifacts, 2nd half - after the connection is back, is fine

  • The other way around: first part is fine, 2nd part is all artifacts

  • The 2nd part isn’t even in the recorded file

  • All of the recording is there, but the player does not know the length or end of the file

This was tested on two different systems (one EC2 m3.xlarge, one VMWare VM; both Linux). Only like 20% of the recordings did actually go well.

How can we make a recorder tackle/handle a dropout?

Check wowza Split Recording .