@mux/ai

Hey, Phil from MuxAir with a quick demonstration of our new HLS running

streams feature which can give you increased resilience to larger scale

internet service outages such as major CDN failures. Let's get started. I've

got

a stream up and running on my other laptop and I'm just gonna play back that

stream in HLSJS. We've got the Firefox network inspector open on here on the

bottom and we've got Charles proxy open on the right which we're gonna use to

simulate our CDN failures. Okay, so let's enable a CDN failure. The stream

doesn't have redundant streams turned on right now. So what we're gonna do is

force one of CDNs to return 503s. What we'll see happen is the player

reattempts those segments a couple of times and eventually it's gonna run out

of buffer that it's pre-downloaded and then it's gonna enter a buffering state

as we commonly call it and eventually this will transition into a more

permanent failure. Okay, so not great. So let's turn back off our 503s, clear

out

our logs on both sides and enable redundant live streams. All you have to

do to enable these is add the query parameter redundant streams equals true.

If you're using signed live streams you just need to embed this into your JWT

claims body and let's hit play. Great, so our stream starts up as normal, no

differences so far. Let's see what happens if we encounter a 503 now on our CDN

.

What we're gonna see happen is the player's gonna request a segment, it's

gonna get a 503 and it's immediately gonna fail over to a secondary CDN at

the same resolution on the same rendition. So example here we failed over on

segment 1068 onto a secondary CDN and a stream kept playing with no issues

whatsoever. This is a great first step in improving the resilience of your live

streams. It works on the majority of common HLS video players and it's

available to all Mux accounts now and it's free, so enjoy!