I am doing real time streaming to flash using wowza and a custom encoder. The bitrate usually varies from 500-800Kbps. The flash buffer size is set to 3 secs. For the most of the clients the experience is quite good.
Last night we had a few complaints about choppy video - frozen frames and flash skipping frames to catch up. I looked at the logs, and there seemed nothing unusual. The client bandwidth was ok and we are able to continuously push the stream. The cpu usage on the client machine was not very high either. So the only thing I can think that might be wrong was that packets were getting lost or coming late and/or out of order.
My understanding of protocol is not the best, so I have a few questions
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Is is possible/likely that packets will be come delayed more than 3 secs (the flash buffer size)? I am guessing if they are late by less than 3secs, it should not matter, because flash will sort the packets in the buffer
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Does the flash player request for retransmissions for late/lost packets?
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Do these retransmission requests get handled at the TCP level or the application level (wowza)?
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Are there settings in wowza to set up buffer size to handle retransmissions?
Thanks for your help.
Vivek