BobSammers wrote: 
> I'm (fortunately) not seeing the buffering problems (and TheLastman, I'm
> on PlusNet fibre and it's worked flawlessly for iPlayer and everything
> else since I got it a few years ago).

My feeling (and it is only a feeling as I can get evidence) is that the
rebuffering problems have a "local" element.  The BBC streams are
delivered by CDNS (Content Delivery Networks) Akamai, Limelight, Level 3
and ATOS but I have only seen URLs for Akamai and Limelight in the
BBCIplayer streams.  Although these CDNs have load balancing there seem
to be some regional division and also how CDNs are interconnected with
ISPs such as PlusNet can affect performance.

In addition there seems to be a "maintenance" issues as well - I can
play stream for hours with no problems and then burst of problems (i.e.
very slow packets) often very late at night or at weekends.

I am currently running test to see if there is an implementation issue. 
On the same server with same network connection, I am running LMS with
BBCIPlayer 1.4.8 (with cache bug fixed) and comparing against the DASH
reference player
(http://dashif.org/reference/players/javascript/v2.3.0/samples/dash-if-reference-player/index.html)
in Chrome.  Playing same stream (e.g.
http://a.files.bbci.co.uk/media/live/manifesto/audio/simulcast/dash/nonuk/dash_low/ak/bbc_radio_three.mpd
) on BBCiPLayer and a Chrome Browse with DASH player (using developer
tools for network packet analysis) allows me to compare packet delays.  
I can also compare perfromance of CDNs.

>  I do experience a problem that I've always assumed is just one of those
> things, but it seems worth raising it in case it's down to a
> misconfiguration or something else fixable. If I pause a listen again
> stream (definitely on Extra, not sure about iPlayer), it's okay for a
> few minutes, maybe a few hours and I can un-pause later and continue
> from where I left off. Several hours later and almost certainly by the
> next day, if I try to resume a paused programme the playback fails and I
> have to go back through the menus to start playing again from the
> beginning, losing my place.
> 
> Is this normal? I've assumed it's perhaps a token issued by the BBC for
> my stream that is expiring, but I'm just speculating.
Normal file or live http stream are a single GET and a stream of a
largne number bytes (e.g. at least 3 minutes) . When stream as paused
LMS get http connection open and temporarily stopped reading. DASH is
chunked http with many 6 secs fragments so it is like playing many many
small files gapless and when you pause the stream will be HTTP
connection is usually closed so LMS support for pause doesn't work. This
issue was only been reported to me about 1-2 months ago.   I have been
looking into it as well as rebuffering and possible setting for CDN
preference but making time has been a bit difficult.


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