FIXED: Massive buffering / delays on some (NASA) ustream channels (it was due to running old version of omxplayer)

[liamkennedy]

EDIT: Fixed. See comments below:

I wonder if you can verify an odd but repeatable issue with certain ustream channels on Raspberry Pi (this is repeatable across many Pi's I have here).

Launch this channel/stream
livestreamer http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iss-hdev-payload 480p --player omxplayer --fifo

The video will often start playing for a few seconds (or more) and then go in to a 2 minute pause before starting up again - with no further re-buffering needed until I stop the stream again.

I am not sure if the omxplayer's --player-args "video_fifo xx {filename}" will do anything to help.. I tried that.. but it seemed to make no difference. (not a lot of documentation on omxplayer it seems).

Note: That stream is from the international space station - and it will have something visible for about 45 minutes out of every 90 minutes (due to the orbit of the ISS - this stream only shows things when the ISS is in daylight). So when you view it - you may need to wait until there is something to see before you can see this for yourself.

An alternative Ustream that I can duplicate this on which may be easier to work with is
livestreamer http://www.ustream.tv/leolaporte best --player omxplayer --fifo

You should see it plays for the first few seconds (maybe 10-20) then goes in to an extended pause. No Errors are reported from Livestreamer while this is happening.

YOUTUBE LIVE STREAMS - WORK WITHOUT ISSUE (tried up to 1080p)
Try any other stream - like one from YouTube Live (this link likely won't work for very long)

livestreamer http://youtu.be/N7ScYorOTkY 720p --player omxplayer --fifo

That one streams immediately on the Pi.. with no buffering/pausing.

Is this something related to the UStream plugin? The channel itself?

Anything I can do to improve this?

Thanks for creating such an amazing capability in any case. This is truly exceptional.

[chrippa]

Well, the UStream streaming protocol is similar to HLS (that YouTube uses) in that they are both segmented streaming types. But the main difference is that on UStream information about next available segment arrives less reliably. This can cause inconsistent throughput, especially in the start of the playback.

I don't know if omxplayer has an option for this, but enabling some caching is likely to help. If that is not possible you can always use one of the streams prefixed mobile_, these are HLS and should work more reliably at the cost of slightly lower quality.

[liamkennedy]

UPDATE: I decided I needed to update my image with the latest kernel / firmware in prep for b+ (sudo apt-get update / upgrade and rpi-update.

Seems I was on a VERY old version of omxplayer. Since doing the upgrade it looks like this pausing/buffering of ustream channels has been fixed.