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Streaming Video Freezes During Playback

Symptom

Video freezes while being played. The entire live streaming process involves the streaming end, playback end, and origin server in Live (CDN). Therefore, freeze may occur in each phase. See Figure 1. You are advised to perform the following operations to locate the cause:

Figure 1 Live streaming process

Check the Streaming End

It may be because freeze occurs during stream pushing due to factors such as configurations of the streaming device, video parameter settings, and network environment. If freeze occurs on the streaming end, locate the cause from the following aspects:
  • Device configurations

    During stream pushing, a certain proportion of CPU resources are occupied. If a low-end device with poor hardware configurations is used and its overall CPU usage exceeds 80%, freeze and artifacts will occur, resulting in degradation in video quality. You can change device configurations or use a higher version of streaming device to ensure device stability.

  • Streaming SDK configurations

    If the bitrate, frame rate, and encoding level set on the encoder are too high, the encoding speed will become slow due to hardware restrictions. Therefore, you are advised to use hard coding on iOS devices because the iOS system is highly compatible with hardware devices and is more power-saving. Android devices have different models and various types of CPUs. It is recommended that Android 4.3 and later versions use hard coding.

  • Video parameter settings

    Generally, to ensure video smoothness, the frame rate is set to be greater than 15 frames per second (FPS). If the frame rate is lower than 10 fps, noticeable freezes occur. Unless otherwise specified, set the frame rate to a value between 15 fps and 30 fps. Human eyes cannot see more than 30 fps. The bandwidth cost for video transmission also increases with the frame rate.

  • Network bandwidth

    Perform an online bandwidth test. It is recommended that upstream bandwidth be greater than 10 Mbit/s.

  • System resource usage

    Check whether a large number of programs are running on the server. It is recommended that you delete and stop these programs to release resources.

Check the Playback End

  • Most players have a receive buffer. A player decodes and plays the video after the buffer is full. The size of the receive buffer also affects freeze during playback. You are advised to adjust the size of the receive buffer to avoid video freezes.
  • If the playback device uses hard encoding in a poor network environment, drop frames and reduce audio bitrate to avoid video freezes.
  • Perform an online bandwidth test. If the bandwidth of the player is insufficient or jitter occurs, videos will freeze. Check whether downloading occupies high bandwidth. It is recommended that you do not perform any operations (such as downloading) that will occupy a large amount of bandwidth while playing.

Check the Origin Server in Live (CDN)

If both the streaming end and playback end are normal, submit a service ticket with your ingest domain name and streaming domain name included to reach technical support.