Nov 16th, 2010 by flingsoft
A number of Movie Vault users have been reporting streaming issues under various network connections and I wanted to give everyone an update of our progress. Many users/reviewers are referring to this as “crashing”, but in actuality it is an issue with the actual streams. In all our testing we never experienced any issues and Apple never identified any issues during review, so we leaned heavily on them to help identify the issue.
First, we started by increasing our infrastructure. We moved from our multi-server environment to a content delivery network (CDN) allowing us to instantly increase our availability worldwide. We saw a definitive speed improvement for most users, but again still “crashing” issues came in.
Next, we moved from the CDN into a video on demand (VOD) service much like Netflix, Hulu, and others use. More expensive for us, but well worth it as we immediately saw even faster response time from the servers. Yet again, “crashing” issues still came in.
At this point, several users were very helpful in tracking down some potential issues which we then communicated to Apple. Apple was still at a loss, but thankfully we just had an internal breakthrough the other day.
The majority of the issues reported are coming from 3G, Classic, and iPod Touch 2G users which was our first clue. We had tested on a 3G though so it was a bit perplexing as we could see it working. So we started isolating each stream independently, and there was the culprit. To understand the streaming on the iPhone, imagine there are multiple versions of every movie on the server each created to handle different bandwidth levels. The iPhone is smart enough to switch this as you watch dependent on your connection speed.
As it turns out one of the streams has a slight different encoding than others. The “mid/low” stream was encoded with x264 Main 3.1 (as a user this means nothing, but it means a lot for the streaming experience). It turns out Apple didn’t make their video player consistently backward compatible due to hardware issues. So the 3GS, 4, Touch 3 and higher, and iPad all can play 3.1 but the 3G and older cannot. This means when your phone switches you to this stream and you are on an older device, it will “drop” or “crash”.
SO…..
Thankfully we can fix it, but it will take some effort. We basically need to re-encode all the content for this low stream and then re-upload to the servers. Note that we have over 1,000 movies so its going to take a few weeks, but we will do it in a rolling fashion. As movies get completed, then we will push those videos up. Note, if you are on a strong Wifi connection with limited latency, then it probably won’t be an issue for you. Also, it will work if you upgrade your phone ;) (kidding)
I hope this clears things up and again, just wanted people to know we are on it!!
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