Our Flash Streaming Player Occasionally Stutters like a Skipping CD after a Period of Time
- by Jonathan Fritz
We offer a streaming player for a number of our clients, who are responsible for their providing us with their own audio streams. We have written a very simple flash player that can play all of the streams that we support (icecast/shoutcast/live365/mp3 over http/etc).
Unfortunately, we have found that when listening, our player sometimes begins to stutter (like a skipping cd), sometimes after only 10 minutes, and sometimes after an hour of listening. We have noticed this behaviour in firefox on both linux and windows.
Does anybody know anything about this problem? We know that flash isn't ideal for infinite streams of audio, but it's about all that we can find that's on every platform out there. If anybody can suggest a solution to our problem, I'll be your friend forever.
Here is a link to the live player:
http://cr-jf.jfritz.02.dev.wecreate.com/streaming/player_v5/
Note that you'll need to test in a browser that isn't IE, because we use WMP in IE, and that the JavaScript on the page will cause the player to unload and re-load once an hour because of memory issues.
Because I can only put one hyperlink in a post, I'll add a link to the player source code as a comment.
Thanks all!
