buffering

[hrorek]

I'm testing Mezzmo on several devices and sometimes it buffers the entire video before playing and sometimes it streams. What defines this and can I force it to always stream. One example is on my android tablet. I get the video with Bubble and with GPayer it buffers and with Video Ultimate it streams.

[Paul]

The buffering is being caused by your medi aplayer app on your Android app. I guess Mezzmo server is transcoding the video and your media player app is looking for parts of the video (typically the internal index) so it knows how to play both the video and audio parts of the video file. When transcoding, this internal index is only written into the transcoded file when transcoding has completed. So that may explain why the media player is buffering for so long. To test this, try pre-transcoding a video (see http://forum.conceiva.com/showthread.php/6025-Tutorial-Pre-transcoding-Files) and once the file has been fully transcoded, then try streaming the video. If it plays immediately, then that matches our assumption.

For your Android tablet, we would certainly recommend that you try our Mezzmo Android app and the MX Player app (which is great for playing videos) on your Android tablet. This combination does not buffer and will provide an optimal user experience.

[hrorek]

In the case I was referring to it was not transcoding. In any event I started trying different profiles and I've managed to get better results. I took a look at the profiles and was quite surprised to see huge differences in profiles that I expected to be very similar... i.e. AnroidToMXVideoPlayer vs. AnroidToVPlayer. Is there any documentation for the profiles?

I would be happy to switch client software however the Mezzmo recommended ones don't float and that's a key requirement for me.

[Paul]

Sorry - no documentation for the device profiles. Each media player app on Android does have different capabilities (formats, etc.), so that's why you see differences in the device profiles.

Not sure I understand "... the Mezzmo recommended ones don't float and that's a key requirement for me."

[hrorek]

Some players on Android have the ability to play in a window... float. GPlayer does this as does the native player on my Lenovo tablet.

[Paul]

Understand now. Thanks.