The most likely reason for high CPU usage, video buffering, pausing or stopping is that Transcoder profiles are used on the service and the CPU is not powerful enough. Transcoding requires a great amount of processing power and even powerful CPUs will struggle to perform with high quality transcoding. We recommend you refer to our Transcoder on VPS Benchmarks: https://www.mediacp.net/documentation/transcoder-benchmarks/
To confirm the issue, we first recommend testing the stream with the following configuration:
- Disable all Transcoder profiles (including Passthru)
- Disable nDVR
- Restart the service and try again
If you continue to see buffering, pausing or stopping and transcoder profiles are not enabled then there is likely a problem with the network of either the client encoder or the server. In this case you can try reducing the bitrate that you are streaming, try a low bitrate such as 500Kbps to see if the video plays smoothly.
Advanced Testing
For further tesiting you can use the theoplayer stream tester as another method to isolate a cause for your buffering.
- Copy your services stream link (https://demo.mediacp.net:1936/WowzaTVStation/WowzaTVStation/playlist.m3u8)
- Open up the THEOplayer test website https://www.theoplayer.com/test-your-stream-hls-dash-hesp
- Select Use your own stream and input the stream link
- Select Click Here to Load Your Stream
You can also complete testing by running the following ffmpeg command on your server, adjusting the index.m3u8 file to your service:
/usr/local/mediacp/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg -re -i https://localhost:8081/8034/index.m3u8 -c copy -f mp4 test.mp4
Then comparing the output to what you see running it externally on your own machine or another server in a different location:
/usr/local/mediacp/ffmpeg/bin/ffmpeg -re -ihttps://demo.mediacp.net:8081/8034/index.m3u8-c copy -f mp4 test.mp4
If the stream is playing out at a realtime speed on your server but slower when running the command externally there is going to a network issue at hand and we reccomend contacting your datacentre.
