Page 1 of 1

Streaming failures in VLC 3.x and VLC 4.x

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 17:55
by cubimol
A year ago I prepared a script for Windows that allows me to install a streaming server on my PC to transcode high definition TV channels and see them when I'm traveling (through another OpenVPN server installed on my router) and the Wi-Fi bandwidth available is small.

It has always worked well with VLC 2.x and I have been able to watch HDTV with a bandwidth of only 2 Mbps.

My problem is that streaming with this script does not work well (VLC clients do not always see streaming or it is interrupted after a few seconds) with all the VLC 3.x and VLC 4.x versions I've tried, and I've had to reinstall VLC 2.2.8.

Important: All my remote devices, VLC Clients, are android (phone, tablet and TV Box). My VLC Server, with default preferences, is for Windows 10.

Does anyone know what happens?

My VLC_Server.bat that starts with Windows is:

start "" "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" ^
--sout-transcode-audio-sync ^
--sout-keep ^
--sout="#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1280,scale=Auto,height=480}:http{mux=ts,dst=:55555/live}" ^
--ntservice-install ^
--intf="http" ^
--http-password="vlc" ^
--no-playlist-autostart ^
--repeat ^
--avcodec-hw=any ^
--dummy-quiet ^
"my remote IPTV subscription channel list m3u" ^
"my local IPTV server DVB-T channel list m3u"

Re: Streaming failures in VLC 3.x and VLC 4.x

Posted: 19 Feb 2018 18:31
by InTheWings
To help you, we need messages, to completely understand what your problems is.
To fix this, please be sure before you start the playback to:
  1. Open: Tools -> Messages.
  2. Set Verbosity to 2
  3. Start playback to reproduce your issue
  4. Save text in a file or copy into clipboard
  5. Then paste the full resulting log here between [​code]and[​/code] (or use Pastebin.com if it's too long)
Also don't forget to name your Operating System and provide the VLC media player version.

Re: Streaming failures in VLC 3.x and VLC 4.x

Posted: 21 Feb 2018 22:40
by cubimol
The failures are of three types:

1.- The first type is an error in calculating dimensions of the transcoded frame when Auto appears on the command line.

In VLC 3.x the combination "scale = Auto, height = 480" does not always work well with the x264 encoder because sometimes the width requirements of x264 (multiple of 2) are not met. I think that this is not a good reason to abort the coding, but it would be sufficient to do an automatic adjustment of dimensions and send a warning. It is also not a good reason to visualize a nonsense error like this below:

Streaming / Transcoding failed:
It seems your Libav / FFmpeg (libavcodec) installation lacks the following encoder:
H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10).
If you do not know how to fix this, ask for support from your distribution.
This is not an error inside VLC media player.
Do not contact the VideoLAN project about this issue.

2.- The second type is warnings for "late buffer for mux input" (in VLC 2.2.8 it works well). I have solved this with a "network-caching" value equal to or greater than 2000.

3.- With what I have just said there are no more errors or warnings but the remote android client VLC 3.0.1 is unable to play the stream produced by VLC 3.x, which has no problem in reading the stream produced by VLC 2.2.8 .