Buffering problems

Mike Bluck

New Member
Hi,
I have a lot of issues with my radio buffering. The sound going into the laptop is fine but on the internet-radio website it is constantly stop starting in the standard media player, however it is fine when opened in realplayer/itunes etc. I thought that the problem was with my internet connection as I am using a mobile internet dongle, so the signal can be touch and go, but because it is fine in media players makes me think that it is not that which is the problem.
Thanks for any help
 

General Lighting

Super Moderator
Staff member
unfortunately, there may not be any good news here.

mobile telecoms is a ruthlessly commercial market and the companies will deliver the minimum service the Communications Ministry of your country insists on, no more. Even though I live in a large town in England, I cannot receive any Internet station without buffering outside the small 3G or EDGE area on a mobile. The surrounding rural areas are no go.

Never tried transmitting, but another nasty is that mobile companies themselves often quite deliberately make it extremely difficult to use their IP services to transmit real time audio, because it would be competing with their own premium priced voice services especially if folk were able to use cheaper VOIP services than the conventional voice comms.

There is no law preventing them doing this in many nations, even ones with strong traditions of liberal free speech, as the censorship is a free market commercial rather than a political decision and most "free speech" campaigners concentrated their resources on combating political censorship and overlooked the risks of commercial censorship (which in a mostly liberal but capitalist world is much harder to combat!)

if it is completely impossible for you to get a "normal" broadband connection from your preferred TX location, then the only solution may be to contact the mobile company and be 100% honest about what you are doing.

they might be able to find a solution but it is very likely they will try and upsell you to a business grade connection of some sort, a solution for the broadcast industry (warning: these can be expensive!) - or simply tell you "this isn't in the contract terms" and walk away from the deal.

if you read EBU (European Broadcasting Union) news (both tech and production) you will see the "big boys" including mobile companies are looking very closely at the rise in online broadcasting and they want to make their cut of the revenue especially in this economic depression.

depending on your content, if it is speech based and you have the resource to have a bigger studio with fixed broadband connection, you could do it the old way using the mobile phone as a phone, as call costs are relatively cheap within a single country or from mobile to fixed line..

Alex
 
Last edited:

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
Some good advice from General Lighting.

However, one thing that we have noticed from looking at your account and tuning into your stream just now is that you have an intro file. From listening in we noticed that the intro file plays correctly but then the subsequent audio after buffers. We are sure the problem is related to your intro file. If this is not encoded correctly for your stream, this will cause issues with flash based players although it will work fine in most media players.

The intro file needs to be at the correct bitrate (64kbps), number of channels (stereo) and samplerate (44.1khz) as configured for your stream. If you remove the intro file and restart the server this should fix the problem. We then recommend correctly re-encoding the intro file again. :)
 

Mike Bluck

New Member
Thankyou Gneral Lighting, some very good points there. Will have to remember this post if we encounter future problems.

Ah I did wonder if it would be that intro file, as the service was fine until I put that in. Thanks for your help support! I'll get that reencoded now :D
 
Top