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I am (at long last) at the very end of a VOD project. It works perfectly, except on Android. Basically, on Android video will not play until the entire video has downloaded. A media server was well out of scope, so we are just serving the videos up from AWS S3. Works fantastically on iOS. Both streaming and downloading the video works exactly as you would expect it to. On Android, it just doesn't seem to want to play before the download finishes. It works well when using a server on the local network (I even see the occasional buffer, so I know it's not just quickly downloading), but nothing remote.

My only guess is that it is to do with the differences in the way iOS and Android stream video. On iOS, video streams via byte-range requests. Every few seconds, it will time itself out and request another range of bytes for the file. On Android, it only sends a single request for the entire file. Not sure how that could be fixed, however.

Does anyone have any tips or pointers here? Any help would be greatly appreciated here.

  • Happens on Android 4.4 and 4.3.
  • Using both a remote prod server we own and AWS S3.
  • AIR 3.9 with Flex 4.11
  • Utilizing StageVideo and NetStream
  • Test devices are a Nexus 5 and a Nexus 4
Josh
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1 Answers1

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The issue was with the videos themselves. AIR for Android uses the standard approach to streaming where the entire file is requested and it reads it bit-by-bit (as opposed to iOS which requests specific byte-ranges repeatedly).

The problem here is that the player cannot begin playback until the video's metadata has been read. A standard h.264 encode sees the metadata (moov atom) located at the very end of the file, so the video does not begin until the entire video has been downloaded.

Easiest way I have found to fix this is re-encoding the videos through Handbrake with the "Web Optimized" option selected. This will ensure the metadata is located at the very beginning (byte 24, I believe) so the video should begin playing instantly.

Explanation from Adobe

Thread that gave me the idea to use the "Web Optimized" option

Josh
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  • Wow! Sounds exactly like something one could lose a lot of time and quite a lot of hair debugging. :-) Thanks for posting the solution. – jpop Nov 14 '13 at 12:32
  • Trust me, someone did lose a lot of time and quite a lot of hair debugging that. – Josh Nov 14 '13 at 15:12