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HLS Streams taking approx 30secs in Chrome to reach high quality

Hi,

Our live HLS adaptive bit-rate streams are performing poorly in Chrome with JW Player 7.7.0 - the player, with the hlshtml configuration option not set, is loading the stream quickly in Chrome 53, but starts playback at the lowest resolution (which looks terrible) before slowly increasing in quality to eventually reach the highest quality 720p after approx 30 seconds. We have not had this issue with previous versions of JW Player.

In other browsers, such as Firefox 49 with Flash, the video still loads quickly and is displaying immediately at the highest quality (at least on a fast connection), which is the behaviour we would expect.

For an example of the player and streams in a live environment please see eg. http://www.shetland.org/60n/webcams/sealevel-cam

Setting hlshtml to true seems to fix the quality issue in Chrome. However, we are reluctant to enable it as the player then seems to take significantly longer to start playback in all browsers.

We notice IE11 + Flash also has the same issue as Chrome, taking a long time to reach the high quality playback.

Can you please advise if there is anything we can do about these issues.

Thanks

3 Community Answers

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Donni

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

I’m seeing somewhat similar behavior in Safari outside of our player. Use Apple’s mediastreamvalidator and make corrections to the stream as needed and let me know if it helps.

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a...

User  
0 rated :

I've done further testing and am consistently replicating the issue in Chrome 54 with JW Player 7.7.1 (Flash Version 23), where it takes JW Player 30secs+ to reach an acceptable image quality when the responsive player (16:9) is contained within a div under 853px wide. If the width is set to be larger than this it's loading fine.

I've created two demo pages to illustrate:

* Up to 853px - http://sorg.nbcom.co.uk/demo-jw-853.html - In Chrome 54, takes 30secs+ to reach an acceptable quality. Note the colour flags in the top-right as the quality changes.
* 854px and larger - http://sorg.nbcom.co.uk/demo-jw-854.html - In Chrome 54, consistently loads immediately at the highest quality (on a fast connection).

Thanks for the note about the mediastreamvalidator tool - I've passed on the results for investigation. However, the issue we're experiencing appears to be a bitrate selection issue and not a server issue. We note that in other players the streams are loading immediately at highest quality in Chrome, regardless of the container width. The same streams also worked fine in Chrome in previous versions of JW Player (we're reluctant to downgrade however given other benefits of the latest JW 7.7).

Can you please advise if you're aware of any bugs, or settings that we've missed, which could cause this issue? In particular given the 853/854px breakpoint. Thanks.

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Donni

JW Player Support Agent  
0 rated :

For others that come across this post, we are currently tracking an issue with how the flash layer chooses qualities.

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