iPad playback pause resumes at a live point rather than at the paused point

[Petr Nejedly]

My test:

• stopped serviio
• deleted all logging (clean log!)
• started serviio
• started a movie (which needs transcoding to play) <- starts from 0
• stopped the movie
• started the movie again (10 seconds interval between stop and start!) <- starts NOT from 0 but (I think!) from where it is currently in the transcoding
• stopped the movie
• started the movie again (10 seconds interval between last stop and start!) <- starts NOT from 0 but (I think!) from where it is currently in the transcoding (ahead from last start!)

[Petr Nejedly]

So by 'stopping' I assume we mean 'pausing'.

Thins behaviour is most likely caused by the player thinking the video is a life stream (as it's being transcoded on the fly and has not been completely transcoded yet - segments are being added). Pause with a life stream would be expected to unpause on the live video point rather than to buffer the stream for (potentially) ages on the client side.

I will see if something can be done with:

• telling the player it's not actually a live stream
• intercepting the pause event and store the current position to be used when resuming
• check if this is even doable with Serviio server side, do we return only a subset of the manifest? (hopefully we return the whole thing for vod files and snapshot for live streams)
• disable pause all together (?) if it makes better user experience

[Petr Nejedly]

It looks like Flowplayer 6 (html5) works quite well with pausing the live streams. Might do this when #952 is done.

[Robert Nagtegaal]

In reply:

So by 'stopping' I assume we mean 'pausing'.

NO! By stopping I mean stopping.

[Petr Nejedly]

How do you Stop? I only see the pause button in the control bar of the video player on iPad. Or do you mean closing the MediaBrowser modal and opening it again?

[Robert Nagtegaal]

Serviio is a streaming server? Thus my clients (iPad, PC's etc thus vlc, mplayer, ffmpeg etc...) will request a content item from serviio. Serviio gives the content to the client in the form of a stream. Its this stream I stop playing or start again (NOT RESUME, thats pausing right!)

I Never ever use the web player you provide. We made our own players. But the result is the same. Maybe you'd like to have a Skype call so I can show you what I am doing?

But in a nutshell: I request a stream from serviio via API. I play this stream. I quit the player. I restart the player with former stream (Although newly requested from serviio) and now Serviio gives me this stream again. But meanwhile serviio has been busy! It has transcoded (from the first call) a whole lot of the movie already which serviio gladly shows on the second client call. Unfortunately, this client likes to watch the movie from the start too!

[Petr Nejedly]

Got it. Sorry, forgot you're not using MediaBrowser. Will try to reproduce locally.

Btw, 1.7 beta is released, do you still see this behaviour with this version?

[Robert Nagtegaal]

To be honest, I have to retest against B1.7. I forgot the outcome!

[Petr Nejedly]

will leave it for the new HTML5 player