IE11 Live stream playback issue

[neilRGS]

Hi.

I am having trouble with Live stream playback through IE11. The player loads on screen and then nothing further happens.

UPDATE:-----:
Looking in IE developer tools, I can see that the manifest is being read every 10s (approx)

In Edge and Firefox, video and audio chunks are loaded in between the maifest reads. So it looks as through IE is maybe not parsing the manifest. I could be wrong in that assumption, but that's what it looks like.

VOD playback works fine.

Below is the output from the browser support page, viewed through IE11:

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

Neil.

========== Browser Support page output ==============
userAgent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.3; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Required Features FAIL
QoE Stats OK
Subtitles missing
Encrypted Content unknown
Offline Content OK
Requires Polyfills yes
===== =====
HTMLMediaElement (unprefixed)
MediaSource (unprefixed)
Promise (not found)
Uint8Array (unprefixed)
VTTCue (not found)
fullscreenElement ms
fullScreenElement (not found)
CustomEvent (not usable)
indexedDB (unprefixed)
video/webm; codecs="vp8" (not found)
video/webm; codecs="vp9" (not found)
video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E" (supported)
video/mp2t; codecs="avc1.42E01E" (not found)
getVideoPlaybackQuality (unprefixed)
droppedFrameCount (not found)
decodedFrameCount (not found)
generateKeyRequest (not found)
MediaKeys MS
create (not found)
isTypeSupported (unprefixed)
requestMediaKeySystemAccess (not found)
MediaKeySystemAccess (not found)
getConfiguration (not found)
MediaKeySession MS
org.w3.clearkey (not found)
com.widevine.alpha (not found)
com.microsoft.playready (supported)
com.adobe.access (not found)
com.apple.fairplay (not found)

=============== END ============================

[peyoh]

@neilRGS,
whatrelease number you are using ? 1.6.2 or 1.6.3 ?

[neilRGS]

@peyoh. Hi. I am using 1.6.3

[peyoh]

Please revert to 1.6.2 and try again.

[neilRGS]

@peyoh. Will do. I'll post the result of doing that, here.

[neilRGS]

@peyoh. I have downloaded, built and tried 1.6.2
Unfortunately, no difference in behaviour has been observed.
I will look at it again later today/tomorrow, as I need to jump on to a new task now

Thanks.

[peyoh]

@neilRGS Thank you for your time.
I've also tried on IE11 with live profile and the result is the same as yours. I provide also support page output. Hope this can help.

`Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; rv:11.0) like Gecko { manifest: {
 basic: true 
application/dash+xml: false 
application/x-mpegurl: false 
application/vnd.apple.mpegurl: false 
application/vnd.ms-sstr+xml: false 
mpd: false 
m3u8: false
 ism: false } 
media: { basic: true video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E": true 
video/mp4: true 
audio/mp4; codecs="mp4a.40.2": true 
audio/mp4: true video/webm; codecs="vp8": false 
video/webm: false 
video/webm; codecs="vp9": false 
audio/webm; codecs="vorbis": false 
audio/webm: false
 audio/webm; codecs="opus": false
 video/mp2t; codecs="avc1.42E01E": true 
video/mp2t: true 
video/mp2t; codecs="mp4a.40.2": true 
text/vtt: true 
application/mp4; codecs="wvtt": false 
application/mp4: false 
application/ttml+xml: false 
application/mp4; codecs="stpp": false } 
drm: { basic: true 
org.w3.clearkey: false 
com.widevine.alpha: false 
com.microsoft.playready: false
 com.apple.fps.2_0: false 
com.apple.fps.1_0: false 
com.apple.fps: false
 com.adobe.primetime: false
 } supported: true
 } `

BRS,
Peyo

[neilRGS]

Hi @peyoh.
I have cleared my browser cache and tried again this morning with v1.6.2
I get a very similar result, in that a blank player loads and then nothing further happens visually.
The manifest loads and then is reloaded every 10s or so.

I had a look at https://html5test.com/ and it shows that IE11 does not support Promise. As there are plenty of Promises in the Shaka code, perhaps that is a major issue.

If so, I wonder why the Shaka docs suggest that IE11 is ok?

Ultimately, as IE11 is a browser in use by a good many of our clients, I am going to have to find something else which will work without flash being installed.
Do you know of any other libraries that I could try?

Many thanks again for your help and input, it is appreciated.

Neil.

[neilRGS]

Hi @peyoh.
A final note.

I have tried using a polyfill and this now shows in the support page that Required Features is 'OK'.
No change in live streaming though.
I used this: https://github.com/taylorhakes/promise-polyfill

I can rule out encoding issues, because I get successful playback in Firefox, Chrome & Edge with both live and VOD. In IE11 only VOD plays successfully.

So, no further on really, but I wanted to add that extra info, for anyone else reading this, experiencing the same problem.

Many thanks

Neil.

[joeyparrish]

@neilRGS @peyoh Shaka support for live on IE11 starts with v2, which has not been released yet.

In v1, we expect that we can set video.currentTime before appending segments. This is not true on IE11. In v2, we no longer have this assumption.

We expect v2 beta to be available in a week or two. Thanks!

[neilRGS]

Hi @joeyparrish
Thank you for the update. That's good to hear!
I will await the release of v2 beta with great anticipation.

If it helps any, I have had a certain amount of success with Dash.js and IE11. It is not production quality though, as it will stream for a while and then seems to get stuck in a loop and then continues etc...
I would obviously prefer to use a single framework if at all possible, and don't want to spend time coercing Dash to work as Shaka is going to be moving in this direction very soon.

Have a good weekend,

Neil.

[joeyparrish]

Thanks, Neil. We are reasonably confident that v2 will solve this for you, since v2's StreamingEngine already passes all unit and integration tests on IE11. Now we just have to complete the rest of v2! :-)

[neilRGS]

Hi Joey.
I hope everything is going well.

Any update on the release of v2 at all?

Thanks in advance,

Neil.