[vlc] Re: frame freeze or show errors?

[Dennis van Amerongen]

Hi,

The "main warning: PTS is out of range (67000), dropping buffer" issue
is
something I'm also running into with mmsh (http/tcp) livestreaming.

I did numerous experiments on this subject. I've never been able to
produce
a stable end result with http streaming over roughly 300 to 400Kbit.

(On the exact same hardware I can encode 4Mbit full PAL resolution using
WME and
play it on WMP just fine using http streaming).

The more bitrate, the more hops along the way, the more TCP retransmits
can occur,
the worse it gets... (turn on the debug window by selecting View,
Messages and
if you're unlucky, you'll notice the PTS and late picture skipped
messages 
accompanied with some distorted sound when playing the stream).

The explanation of a VLC developer on this issue was that this was
probably caused
by VLC not being very happy with receiving "late data" (even if it's
caused by underrun)
while WMP will try to play anyway and what needed to be done in order to
improve things
is to differentiate in VLC's core between "late data" caused by:

1) underrun -> play anyway (even if it's late)
2) the CPU not being able to process the data in time -> drop it so the
CPU can recover
(and this is the way it works now?)

It was also mentioned that changing this behaviour wasn't as easy as it
seems.

Increasing client side caching to about 5 seconds does seem to make the
PTS
problems occur less frequent. Try using these in commandline (or change
from GUI):

--mms-caching 5000 --http-caching 5000

Switching from http (mmsh) to udp streaming should also solve this issue
but
that's not always possible depending on your audience/needs.