Traffic shaping on YouTube livestreams?

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tonysutorius

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#298439 17-Jun-2022 13:36

Hi gang,

I run a video production company and have Hyperfibre for the various times when we need to move very large media files around the world quickly. I have the 2Gb service, and have pfSense well enough tuned that we get 1800Mb through it most of the time, comfortably. Our workstations are on a 10Gb LAN and move data at close to linespeed locally.

Recently I've run into an odd problem where YouTube Live streams uploading from our studio are struggling to be sustained, at a rather modest 6Mb or so. These are either failing entirely, or having mystery slowdowns after a period of time causing unacceptable dropped frames. I have hunted and hunted for an explanation, and am starting to wonder it there may be some sort of traffic shaping being applied by MyRepublic.

Can anyone comment on whether this is known, or likely, or possible?

Legends,

Tony

Talkiet

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#2930930 17-Jun-2022 14:08

First of all, you should find out what ip the live stream is going to. That's an exercise for the reader to figure out but on Windows, Resmon will show you. Also, presuming you are streaming live (and not uploading a previous live stream) then the pacing will be dictated by Youtube - you may be able to choose some options to increase buffering. Personally none of the live streams to youtube I have ever setup showed any issues (and ran for days at a time)...

I suspect the issue will be that the high speed/serialisation rate of your service is meaning that the upload is bursting and backing off at such a rate that it's causing issues. If you're streaming from a linux PC, you could put a shaper on that machine to egress the traffic at a more suitably paced rate.

I think it would be phenomenally unlikely that even Myrepublic would be shaping youtube upload

Cheers - N

Please note all comments are from my own brain and don't necessarily represent the position or opinions of my employer, previous employers, colleagues, friends or pets.

tonysutorius

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#2931042 17-Jun-2022 17:53

Thank you mate, I do appreciate you taking the time to give such a useful diagnosis. It would be ironic indeed if the base problem was too much bandwidth.

\We are somewhat constrained in addressing this by the fact that the actual stream is generally originating from an appliance (ATEM Mini Pro ISO) rather than a PC we can easily add shaping to. But we can do some testing to try to confirm and better understand the dynamics of this diagnosis.

I should add that I spoke with the network techs at MyRepublic today, and am assured there is no shaping done by them on this (or any) profile of streaming data.

Can I ask, do you have a view on the preferability of using HLS vs RTMS, in this regard or in general?

Thanks again,

Tony