My video file keeps freezing when I stream it

[dcamod]

Hello there, I am testing out streaming small video files and I noticed the largest file (65mb) freezes randomly after about being halfway over. The video file is an mp4 recorded at 720p I believe. It is a shared file if you have the link but I am the only one accessing it right now. It is being streamed directly, not downloaded. I saw an older thread about this but it is closed so I opened a new one. I have only a basic account for now because, as I said, I was testing. Thanks in advance for any help.

[Daphne]

Hi there @dcamod, I hope you're having a good day so far!

Just so I can have a better idea of what's occurring here, can you let me know where you're streaming the video? Are you viewing it from the shared link you created, or directly from your account?

Also, would this be through a web browser or the mobile app?

Let me know and we can take it from there!

[dcamod]

It is from a shared link with the end of the URL set to 1. I have tried streaming through chrome and a mobile app made with Unity. The mobile app uses webclient instead of httpclient but the video is not working in chrome either so I'm unsure whether or not that helps.

Quick edit. The video is now working in chrome but not in the application. I am just going to chalk that up to a strange coincidence. The mobile app, however still does not work.

[Daphne]

Thanks for getting back to me here @dcamod!

Apologies for being a bit vague, I was referring to the Dropbox mobile app rather than a third party app. If you open a shared link through the web browser on your mobile, it should give you a prompt to "View in app".

Since it appears to be working now through the website, perhaps it was related to a caching issue. Did you close the browser and restart it at any point?

Keep me posted!

[dcamod · Accepted solution]

The browser was shut down and the cache was cleared before I started it initially. The second time I tried it was the morning after the freezing. I made sure to clear the cache before attempting to view again. I did not restart in the middle of viewing.

As for the application issue, I changed the encoding to H.264 and optimized for web in Handbrake. The video streams now, but is still slow, with pauses here and there. I am under the impression this is due to the video player in Unity being slow. So the good news for you, is that this has nothing to do with you guys and the issue was with Unity. The bad news for me, is that the issue has to do with Unity 😅.
I am not sure what the issue with Chrome was, perhaps I lost connection to the internet? I only reported on here because I seemed to have an issue with the browser and Unity at the same time. It appears to just be coincidence though. Cheers and thanks for the help. Unless you have any other inquiries for me I believe this can be marked as solved.

[Daphne]

That was a bit of a coincidence indeed @dcamod!

In that case then, I'm not sure that there is much more we can look into here if it appears to be working fine through the website now.

It might be something that's worth reaching out to Unity Support for if you stream videos through the app regularly, perhaps they can provide you some more insight on this.

If there's anything else that I can help with in the meantime though, please do let me know.

I hope you have a great day ahead!