We are streaming FLV video using Akamia's streaming service. The video is
encoded at very high quality with Squeeze using the On2 VP6 plugin. We are
using the FLV Playback component in the client. Whenever the user pauses the
video and then tryes to play it again, the video remains frozen for a few
seconds (somtimes as long as 4-5 seconds) while the audio is playing. After
the few seconds the video and audion are back in synch. I have also noticed
that it seems very consistat in terms of the points where the video will synch
back up, so hopefully that will give someone a clue as to why this is
happening. Video encoded with the Spark codec does not seem to have this
problem.

I have also tried a modified version of the "peldi player" and some other
players with the same results . We have also tried some different encoding
settings (although not many yet) and still get the same results.

Has anyome else encountered this problem or found a fix. It is a big fly in
the ointment of an important project, so any help would be very much
appreciated.

I ran into the same problem a few weeks ago. Whenever you pause or take any
control action on the video the stream is broken and then reconnected. So,
what you're seeing is rebuffering and supposedly is normal, though I don't
accept that.

I contacted Macromedia about this and they pointed me to this forum for a
solution...haha.....no solution here, only people with the same "problem".

I figured out the problem. It has to do with keyframe settings in the
encoding. The video will not start playing again until a keyframe is reached.
For some strange reason this article...
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flash/articles/encoding_video_04.html
recommends using a keyframe interval of 8 seconds so that was what we used.
With that setting, it could take up to 8 seconds for the video to start playing
again!! I just did a test and confirmed this. it seems strange that this
would be the case but my tests do confirm it. What really sux is that
increasing the keyframes to an acceptable rate for pausing/restarting makes the
filesize much larger.

If anyone knows more information about this, i'd be glad to hear it.

sleek,

check out the enhancedseek option in FMS....I don't know much about it,
because when I asked Akamai to enable ours, it already was, so I'm assuming you
have the same thing as well. Anyway read up on it, because basically it
generates a keyframe for you if one doesn't exist. It's processor intensive.
Like I said, I don't know much about it but you may want to check it.

Tim

Thanks for that tip. It helped me confirm things. Unfortunatly, that enhanced seek feature does not work with FCS 1.5 and VP6 video....

http://www.macromedia.com/go/19067547