Streaming Terms for Troubleshooting
Some terms used to describe common livestreaming issues:
Audio Artifacts - A noticeable distortion of the audio. Ex: Pops over the audio, breaks, static, garbled, repetitions, etc.
Freezing:
- Freezing (Audio) - Audio pausing for longer than 2 seconds.
- Freezing (Video) - Video pausing for longer than 2 seconds.
- Freezing (Both Audio and Video) - Audio and video pausing for longer than 2 seconds.
No Video - Black Screen, but has audio.
Pixelation - Pixelated or bad quality video, but still obviously the video.
Reverse Time - Video reverses and the counter goes backward for at least a second worth of frames and then progresses as expected again.
Stuttering:
- Stuttering (Audio) - Audio pausing for under 2 seconds.
- Stuttering (Video) - Video pausing for under 2 seconds.
- Stuttering (Both Audio and Video) - Audio and video pausing for under 2 seconds.
Sync, A/V Sync Issues - Audio not lining up with video on subscribe. Audio track ahead of video, or video ahead of audio.
Video Artifacts - A noticeable distortion of the video. Ex: color changes that don't belong, images bleeding into each other, or shadows of old images being superimposed on the current streaming image. Likely indicates missing keyframes.
Zombie - A stream that has been stopped by the publisher but is still listed on the server, blocking that stream name again from being used again. This is a regression bug that resurfaces from time to time. Our team spends a lot of time killing zombies before a new release comes out.