Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues • Hacker News Board

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#11

Post by justherefortart » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #9

sergiotapia wrote: post #6

Life pro tip: Just use an ace stream and have zero connectivity issues. https://www.reddit.com/r/soccerstreams/comments/82ac7j/acest... My brother bought the MMA ticket to watch mcgregor vs mayweather and it was a horrible experience. I booted up my laptop and ran an acestream, boom crystal clear high definition image with zero network issues.

Of course, those streams are not legal.

I've paid for 4-5 different streaming services over the last few years trying to see matches. They inevitably don't work, which is the only reason I use streams I find online.

If some random dude with pr0n popups can make it work but Fox/NBC/ESPN/etc can't, tough shit.

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#12

Post by Someone1234 » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #10

What amazes me is the lack of concern on latency for web streaming. We use the internet (and IP in general) to stream video. At high bitrates (200mbit+) we aim for sub 100ms end to end, for compressed services we're happy with 500ms, maybe upto a second if it's something like Sydney to London over the internet. I was in a control room a couple of weeks ago watching some football. There were two displays, one end was…

Interesting factoid, but some press have agreed to intentional latency as a security feature around certain events and dignitaries. The theory being that a sniper or drone operator cannot use the "live TV" footage to know their exact position.

In some cases international viewers may see the "live" footage before local ones.

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#13

Post by jonknee » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #10

What amazes me is the lack of concern on latency for web streaming. We use the internet (and IP in general) to stream video. At high bitrates (200mbit+) we aim for sub 100ms end to end, for compressed services we're happy with 500ms, maybe upto a second if it's something like Sydney to London over the internet. I was in a control room a couple of weeks ago watching some football. There were two displays, one end was…

"Live" TV broadcasts are also on a delay, so I guess it's all relative. I had a friend who lived near enough to an NFL stadium that you could hear when something big happened and the TV delay made it impossible to enjoy a home game there.

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#14

Post by oh_sigh » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #9

sergiotapia wrote: post #6

Life pro tip: Just use an ace stream and have zero connectivity issues. https://www.reddit.com/r/soccerstreams/comments/82ac7j/acest... My brother bought the MMA ticket to watch mcgregor vs mayweather and it was a horrible experience. I booted up my laptop and ran an acestream, boom crystal clear high definition image with zero network issues.

Of course, those streams are not legal.

Is it illegal be the streamee, the streamer, or both?

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#15

Post by llao » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #14

untog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, those streams are not legal.

Is it illegal be the streamee, the streamer, or both?

It is P2P so you would be both.

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#16

Post by mv4 » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

isostatic wrote: post #10

What amazes me is the lack of concern on latency for web streaming. We use the internet (and IP in general) to stream video. At high bitrates (200mbit+) we aim for sub 100ms end to end, for compressed services we're happy with 500ms, maybe upto a second if it's something like Sydney to London over the internet. I was in a control room a couple of weeks ago watching some football. There were two displays, one end was…

You comment mentions two types of latency:

1. network latency, in milliseconds, that affects stream quality and stability

2. the delay (lag) between real-time capture and what the end user is seeing; this one is usually measured in seconds. A stream needs to be ingested, transcoded, sent from distribution servers to edge servers in each target region - with each step adding to the delay.

Minimizing the lag is very hard, because stripping all buffers (to reduce the delay) makes the stream very sensitive to network conditions (which reduces quality). With most commercial CDN providers you will get 5..10 seconds. It can be reduced to 2..3 sec if you know what you're doing.

edit: in case anyone is interested - in the second scenario, where we achieved 2..3 sec broadcast lag vs real-time, stream source (ingestion) was in the US, and the viewers were in mainland China. Network latency was over 600 msec. Wasn't easy!

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#17

Post by btown » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

Software for scaling up live-streaming CDN points of presence (POPs) is a pretty crazy domain. For on-demand video, you can think of a CDN as a cache, getting known-ahead-of-time chunks. But what about for live streaming? It's not feasible to stream frame-by-frame directly from your encoding backend to all the viewers of the World Cup, over something like RMTP - you'd want to use a CDN. So typically, you distribute meaty (multi-second) HLS segments as individual video files, or collections of files, to your CDN; once available, they then need to be requested by browsers/mobile clients as a whole segment, over HTTP(S). Works well with existing CDN infrastructure (provided they can handle the write volume and have big enough inbound pipes)... but the huge issue is that the length of the segment plus round-trips is a lower bound on effective latency. And when interactivity is required, multi-second delays can be horrible.

https://www.wowza.com/blog/hls-latency-sucks-but-heres-how-t... is a great writeup. Another overview of the problem, and a proposed solution, is in this excellent article by Twitter here:

https://medium.com/@periscopecode/introducing-lhls-media-str...

> In HLS live streaming, for instance, the succession of media frames arriving from the broadcaster is normally aggregated into TS segments that are each a few seconds long. Only when a segment is complete can a URL for the segment be added to a live media playlist. The latency issue is that by the time a segment is completed, the first frame in the segment is as old as the segment duration... By using chunked transfer coding, on the other hand, the client can request the yet-to-be completed segment and begin receiving the segment’s frames as soon as the server receives them from the broadcaster.

And Twitch's followup challenge:

https://blog.twitch.tv/twitch-invites-you-to-take-on-the-icm...

> This Grand Challenge is to call for signal-processing/machine-learning algorithms that can effectively estimate download bandwidth based on the noisy samples of chunked-based download throughput.

(IMO) If you're thinking that this is all rather silly, and that live video streaming is not something that should be done over HTTP in the first place... there are a lot of reasons why this is the case. All the CDN POPs are optimized for HTTP GET requests rather than stateful sessions, and Apple's smiting of Flash removed a lot of incentive for innovation on RTMP servers. The ironic thing is that Internet connectivity is fast/reliable enough nowadays that RTMP might have been able to escape its association with "buffering" spinners, and would provide a much lower-latency experience. Hopefully there's better standardization in the future as live video becomes more mainstream.

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#18

Post by isostatic » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

BBC is doing UHD, with HDR and HLG, for the world cup, with the top stream 36Mbit/second [0]

There are a limited number of "spaces" available [1] -- I think it's upto 100gbit of output.

Unlike with the FA Cup (where the BBC did a uhd trial), the world cup will have a lot of games during the week, where people will be watching from the office (although probably not UHD). This will mean far higher loads on the distribution.

Fortunately England's only 3 games are either at the weekend or at 7PM. The second half of the tournament will really stress the UK internet though, with both World Cup and Wimbledon on during the working week.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2018-05-uhd_hdr_world_cup_2018 [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2018/uhd-vr-worl...

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#19

Post by parthdesai » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #6

Life pro tip: Just use an ace stream and have zero connectivity issues. https://www.reddit.com/r/soccerstreams/comments/82ac7j/acest... My brother bought the MMA ticket to watch mcgregor vs mayweather and it was a horrible experience. I booted up my laptop and ran an acestream, boom crystal clear high definition image with zero network issues.

Use Soda player for ace streams if you are on Mac :)

Re: Avoid FIFA World Cup CDN Issues

#20

Post by isostatic » Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #13

isostatic wrote: post #10

What amazes me is the lack of concern on latency for web streaming. We use the internet (and IP in general) to stream video. At high bitrates (200mbit+) we aim for sub 100ms end to end, for compressed services we're happy with 500ms, maybe upto a second if it's something like Sydney to London over the internet. I was in a control room a couple of weeks ago watching some football. There were two displays, one end was…

"Live" TV broadcasts are also on a delay, so I guess it's all relative. I had a friend who lived near enough to an NFL stadium that you could hear when something big happened and the TV delay made it impossible to enjoy a home game there.

Very minor delay in the UK -- well under 2 seconds from pitch to TV on DTT in the case of the FA Cup. Sure enough to cause some grief when you can hear the crowd, but not enough to get notifications on twitter or whatever.