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The company I work for uses Flash Media Server 3.5 to stream video content. The video files themselves are big, ranging from 500mb to 1gig. We've been running into an issue of when we are streaming a file through jw flv player and we start seeking to different parts in the file. after about 5-6 seeks the player stops as if the connection has been broken and wont resume streaming the file, only upon refreshing the page will it stream the file again. Any ideas why this happens and is it because of the video files being so large?

forgot to add: the flash media server is hosted with edgecast

the protocol is rtmp and the videos are all .flv

willz
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We saw something similar with our videos. We stream videos that are 6 hours long, and due to their size it took quite a while to nut it out.

Our problem ended up being with corrupt metadata at the beginning of the FLV. Because the files were crazy long (and big) the built in Adobe Encoder had a known issue in our version where it would screw it up.

In the end we had to use some obscure tool that we found floating around the internet (sorry I can't find it atm) which took HOURS but it built accurate metadata.

The reason it started playing again after the refresh was because it would re-load the metadata each time the JW Player reloaded the RMTP video.

Update: I found the tool we used. FLVCheck located the error, and FLVMDI fixed it. You can find both of those tools on this page. I wish that page had existed when I was running through this problem!

Mark Henderson
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  • how important is metadata on an flv to flash media server? – willz Oct 07 '09 at 22:41
  • Incredibly. The metadata tells it how long the file is, what its resolution is, compression rate, etc. Without it, the file will just play and play and play and never end, just streaming black, or will it will take a best guess at resolution and compression, which is not always correct. – Mark Henderson Oct 07 '09 at 23:33
  • I've updated my answer with the tools I used. – Mark Henderson Oct 07 '09 at 23:37