When I create a livestream in Wirecast and set it to stream to my Wowza Streaming Cloud trial, the resulting HLS videostream does not play properly in Microsoft Edge on certain systems.
So far, I’ve discovered the stream works fine on computers with a dedicated graphics card, but it does not work properly on laptops or Surface devices with only an Intel HD videochip. On these systems in Edge the lower half of the screen is stretched, filled with pixel artifacts and in general does not render properly. On a still image this issue persists, on moving footage the graphical errors appear mostly after screen changes and then persist for a little while before the stream ‘recovers’ slightly, then it goes bad again a few scene changes later.
I have encountered this error on multiple devices, mostly laptops and Surface tablets, but also a pre-fab Lenovo desktop PC. The problem exists both in our fully up-to-date JWplayer as well as in the OS X / iOS test player on the Wowza website as well as in a standard HTML 5 videoplayer.
I am aware of the FAQ item about this error, which details how Microsoft Edge version 25 apparently does not have this issue. However, the Edge on one of troubled systems is fully updated at version 38.14393.0.0 (EdgeHTML 14.14393) and they still have this issue, so it’s not a simple matter of updating Edge to the latest version.
The Safari browser on Mac OS X does not have these issues, only Microsoft Edge on devices with Intel videochips seem to suffer it.
My streaming settings in Wirecast are as follows:
Video:
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1280x720
FPS: 25
Average bitrate: 2500 kbit/s
Quality : 3 (standard)
Profile: Base
Keyframe every: 50 frames
Constant bitrate and keyframe alignment are OFF, switching these on seems to have no effect.
Audio:
Channels: Stereo
Bitrate: 128 kbit/s
Sample freq: 44.100 kHz.
Also, please note that while our Wirecast Encoder is not the latest release at version 5.0.3, I have also tested this with a trial version of Wirecast 7.1 and got the same bad playback.
Anyone got any advice? I’d love to hear it! Thanks!