Absence of timeout for endless rebuffering

Have you read the FAQ and checked for duplicate open issues? Yes

What version of Shaka Player are you using? v2.5.19 v2.5.10

Can you reproduce the issue with our latest release version? N/A

Can you reproduce the issue with the latest code from master? N/A

Are you using the demo app or your own custom app? Custom app

If custom app, can you reproduce the issue using our demo app? N/A

What browser and OS are you using? Universal Windows Platform (Windows 10) Microsoft Edge v18.19041 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; Xbox; Xbox One; MSAppHost/3.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 Edge/18.19041

For embedded devices (smart TVs, etc.), what model and firmware version are you using? Xbox One

What are the manifest and license server URIs? All of our content is using DASH but we are unable to share the manifests due to client confidentiality.

What did you do? Unable to provide steps to reproduce. See the What actually happened? section for a description of the problem.

What did you expect to happen? If a video is stuck in a rebuffering state for many hours or days, we expect that the Shaka Player will timeout and produce an error or buffering state change event.

What actually happened? We have received a sampling of Mux data from October 2020 through February 2021 for a variety of videos that start playback normally and, without viewer interaction, we see a single start buffering event occurs that results in many hours (e.g., 10 hours) or even multiple days of buffering before an end buffering event occurs (there are no other events recorded during this window of time). The data we have shows that the start buffering event can occur at any portion of the video. We have data for videos under 30 mins and videos that are longer than 1-2 hours. We also have data showing this issue occurring with both DRM (PlayReady) and non-DRM content.

In our custom app, we listen for the Shaka Player error and buffering events and they do not appear to fire during the endless rebuffering period. We are wondering why the Shaka Player does not timeout or error when playback does not recover after a long period of time.

We have been digging into this issue for a few weeks and have not been able to reproduce the behavior on our testing devices. We’d like to start a discussion to learn more about the Shaka Player’s expected behavior as it relates to endless rebuffering and timeouts to find out if this is a bug or not.

A portion of our Shaka Player configuration:

"drm": {
    "retryParameters": {
        "backoffFactor": 2,
        "baseDelay": 400,
        "fuzzFactor": 0,
        "maxAttempts": 4,
        "timeout": 10000
    }
},
"manifest": {
    "retryParameters": {
        "backoffFactor": 2,
        "baseDelay": 400,
        "fuzzFactor": 0,
        "maxAttempts": 4,
        "timeout": 10000
    }
}
"streaming": {
    "bufferBehind": 30,
    "bufferingGoal": 10,
    "jumpLargeGaps": false, 
    "smallGapLimit": 6,
    "rebufferingGoal": 2,
    "retryParameters": {
        "backoffFactor": 2,
        "baseDelay": 400,
        "fuzzFactor": 0,
        "maxAttempts": 4,
        "timeout": 10000
    }
}

[joeyparrish]

Sounds good. If it becomes more common, or if you can help explain how to reproduce it, we will be happy to devote more time and energy to it. In the meantime, I’m going to tag it as “unable to reproduce” and remove it from our triage list. Thanks!

[joeyparrish]

Closing due to inactivity. If you need to reopen this issue, just put @shaka-bot reopen in a comment. Thanks!