Playback does not start for a specific MPEG/TS stream

[goffioul]

I'm running the androidx-media3 demo app (from 1.5.0 release) on an Android device and I've encountered an issue with a specific MPEG/TS stream whereby the playback doesn't start. In the logs, I see a repetition of

12-12 20:54:38.518  5656  5690 W DefaultLoadControl: Target buffer size reached with less than 500ms of buffered media data.

and the playback eventually fails with

12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal: Playback error
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:   androidx.media3.exoplayer.ExoPlaybackException: Unexpected runtime error
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:       at androidx.media3.exoplayer.ExoPlayerImplInternal.handleMessage(ExoPlayerImplInternal.java:721)
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:       at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:102)
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:       at android.os.Looper.loopOnce(Looper.java:201)
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:       at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:288)
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:       at android.os.HandlerThread.run(HandlerThread.java:67)
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:   Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Playback stuck buffering and not loading
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:       at androidx.media3.exoplayer.ExoPlayerImplInternal.doSomeWork(ExoPlayerImplInternal.java:1224)
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:       at androidx.media3.exoplayer.ExoPlayerImplInternal.handleMessage(ExoPlayerImplInternal.java:562)
12-12 20:54:38.532  5656  5690 E ExoPlayerImplInternal:       ... 4 more

A stream sample will be shared via email. This is normally a live TV stream broadcasted with UDP/multicast. For testing purpose, I'm streaming the .ts sample via HTTPS and play it with:

adb shell am start -a androidx.media3.demo.main.action.VIEW -d https://...

I understand that the stream is not clean (quite the opposite), but I'm looking for options in order to handle the case more gracefully than playback failure (and the TV/hardware provider claims everything is ok as VLC can play the channel fine...). I've already tried to tweak various buffering-related constants in the code to work around the issue, but have been unsuccessful so far. I'm not sure the root cause is a buffer-limit issue.

Any assistance or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

[goffioul]

After further debugging, I found out a possible explanation: the PMT table declares 2 AC3 tracks, but there's data in only one of them. This results in Ac3Reader never calling SampleQueue.format(), leaving one of the sample queue without a format. And ProgressiveMediaPeriod.maybeFinishPrepare() is never executed (exits early due to initial checks).

Not sure what's the best approach here. One can of course blame the stream, but as I said, this is coming from a live TV provider, one don't really have control on its content. On the other hand, I'm not sure there's something that can easily be done in androidx-media code base.

[steelbytes]

I'm getting this error trying to stream preview from my gopro10