HTTP Live Streaming, audio but no video

[mattcoz]

We're launching a new video streaming service and trying to get
Android support in place. We've got our videos set up for HTTP Live
Streaming, H.264 Baseline, AAC-LC. This works great on iOS, but on
Android we're having mixed results. On my HTC Hero w/ Gingerbread I
can play the video with audio and no video. At first I thought it
just didn't have the horsepower to play it because I was able to play
a video that I encoded at a lower resolution. I ended up going to
Best Buy to try some other devices to see if they would work. On the
Nexus S it played perfectly, but when I tried on both of the Honeycomb
tablets they had I got the same problem I had on my phone with audio
and no video. Are there any known reasons why this would be
happening? What steps should I take to track down the problem? Could
this be a compatibility problem with the Tegra 2 chipset? Any help
would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Shawn Van Every]

Hi Matt,

Unfortunately, off the top of my head, I don't have any advise.

I would however, love to try out your stream. I have a few different devices and a test application.

Personally, I haven't been able to get HTTP Live Streaming working on anything less than Honeycomb. Never worked on my Nexus 1 running Gingerbread.

Typically, I recommend that organizations use something like Wowza and deliver RTSP to Android devices below Honeycomb.

Hope that helps..

-shawn

Shawn Van Every
vane...@walking-productions.com
Mobile and Streaming Consulting
http://www.walking-productions.com/notslop
Author: Pro Android Media: http://amzn.to/eYb48C

[mattcoz]

Thanks for the response. Here is a link to a test stream on our
server:

httplive://netsmoothstreaming.com/ArcLearn/I_Wildlife-m3u8-aapl.ism/manifest(format=m3u8-aapl)

This is running on a Microsoft IIS Media Services server. It's just a
sample video that came with Windows 7, but it is encoded exactly like
our full videos.

You can also go to this test page that has the Wildlife video above,
and a Big Buck Bunny video from Microsoft:

http://rmiacademy.com/httplive.html

On my HTC Hero with Gingerbread I can play the Wildlife video fine,
but with the Big Buck Bunny video I get sound but no picture. It
doesn't seem to like playing videos over 480x320 resolution, and I'm
fine with that.

On the Nexus S with Gingerbread they all play great, even the higher
resolution videos that our site will go live with.

On the Motorola Xoom with Honeycomb I can play the Big Buck Bunny
video fine, but with the Wildlife video I get sound but no picture.

So, I'm kinda stumped here.

On Apr 30, 4:42 pm, Shawn Van Every <vanev...@walking-productions.com>
wrote:

> vanev...@walking-productions.com
> Mobile and Streaming Consultinghttp://www.walking-productions.com/notslop

[Oguz]

Hi,

I have exactly same problem. I found reason of problem and send as bug
to android community. Problem is that; A m3u8(manifest) file has
profiles and in adaptive stream lowest profile is an audio profile.
Android mediaplayer begins playing from this profile than when it
switches to higher profile (a video profile), it cannot show video, i
think it continues behaving like an audio player. I sent this bug but
still no answer. If you clear audio profile from manifest file by
manually you see it will work.