Very slow buffering in Android

What a pain that the feature isn't there in the reseller control panel. Thank you anyway for your efforts.

At the moment, I think we'll leave the config as it is - at least it's working well now with Android. We haven't got any phone-in shows scheduled in the immediate future, and the latency's not such a big issue for text based chat. If it becomes urgent that we reduce the latency, I'll come back to you to try some smaller buffer settings. Otherwise, let's see if we can hang on until the Centova fix.

Thanks,
Seb
 
Good news! Centova fixed the issue with an interim build that I've just deployed. I've just tested it and it appears to work so feel free to make the changes you need while testing out different settings. Please post any updates you have here as it's interesting for us and countless other people who come across this thread while searching the same issue.
 
Perfect, that's good news!

I'm a little busy at the moment. When I get a bit more time, I'll have a good play with the settings and see if I can figure out what works best for Android. I'll post back....

Thanks again,
Seb
 
Hi,

I finally got a bit of time to do some further testing. It's difficult to get an exact figure for burst-size that minimises play start delay on Android, as the delay seems to vary a lot even on the same Android device with the same stream. But by comparing with a Shoutcast stream (known to have 1MB burst), I settled on a burst-size of 262144 (256K). This works well enough for our 64kbps stream and doesn't add a massive latency (30 seconds or so). 128K definitely wasn't working reliably.

It's annoying that we have to have even this amount of latency just to play nicely with Android. We specifically chose to use Icecast because of the low latency - and in all other devices I've tested, the Icecast default 64K burst-size is plenty.

Anyway, thanks for your help with this. Your excellent customer service is much appreciated :)
 
Thanks for the update :) I'm glad you settled on a figure in the end. It is very odd that you can't mimic Shoutcasts buffer / burst behavior with IceCast.

seb303 said:
Hi,

I finally got a bit of time to do some further testing. It's difficult to get an exact figure for burst-size that minimises play start delay on Android, as the delay seems to vary a lot even on the same Android device with the same stream. But by comparing with a Shoutcast stream (known to have 1MB burst), I settled on a burst-size of 262144 (256K). This works well enough for our 64kbps stream and doesn't add a massive latency (30 seconds or so). 128K definitely wasn't working reliably.

It's annoying that we have to have even this amount of latency just to play nicely with Android. We specifically chose to use Icecast because of the low latency - and in all other devices I've tested, the Icecast default 64K burst-size is plenty.

Anyway, thanks for your help with this. Your excellent customer service is much appreciated :)
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top