Missing segment failover

When a segment is missing, for example when a particular segment fails to download, attempts to recover through a variety of failover attempts. If it cannot recover, it issues an error.

If a segment is missing on the server because, for example, the manifest file is not present, the segment cannot be downloaded, and so on, TVSDK attempts to fail over by trying the following options:

  1. Attempt a failover to the same segment, at the same bit rate, in a variant file.
  2. Switch to an alternate bit rate (ABR switch) in the same file.
  3. Cycle through every available bit rate in every available variant.
  4. Skip the segment and issue a warning.

When TVSDK cannot obtain an alternative segment, it triggers a CONTENT_ERROR error notification. This notification contains an inner notification with the code DOWNLOAD_ERROR code. If the stream with the problem is an alternate audio track, generates the AUDIO_TRACK_ERROR error notification.

If the video engine is continuously unable to obtain segments, it limits continuous segment skips to 5, after which playback is stopped and issues a NATIVE_ERROR with the code 5.

NOTE

The adaptive bit rate (ABR) control parameters are not taken into consideration when a failover occurs. This is because the failover mechanism is designed to use any of the currently available playlists, regardless of their bit-rate profile, as backup streams.

During a failover operation, there can be a profile switch. If an error occurs during the download of one of the playlist segments, ABR control parameters such as min/max allowed bit rate are ignored.

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