Amazon Web Services

3dnative · Wed Nov 30, 2016 8:20 pm

Hi there,

We are using Amazon Web Services to host our 360 tours. We have run into some issues which the AWS tech team have investigated and fed back on the following;

We loaded the webpage in Firefox and observed the following:

1. All content is served from an Amazon S3 bucket in the Frankfurt region.
2. The video content is https://xxxxx
3. The video file is ~ 2.1GB. Downloading it directly in my browser (from inside the Amazon network) I get ~ 10MB per second. But yet the video on the webpage still runs slowly.
4. Looking at the request chain in the page, I see repeated requests for the video file, i.e. the player is repeatedly trying to download parts of the same video file.
5. These requests are “Ranged GETs”, i.e. they mostly asking for parts of the file, not the whole, but the ranges overlap and frequently request large portions of the file.
6. Many browsers impose a limit of 2 concurrent requests to any one host, to avoid overloading it. Although this restriction isn’t needed when accessing Amazon S3, browsers will still impose it.

In short, the slow response seems to be because:

a) large, overlapping chunks of the video file are being repeatedly requested and
b) Since all requests are targeting the same hostname, common browsers will be throttling them to only 2 concurrent requests in flight at any one time.

You should be able to verify the above findings yourself by tracing a page load in your web browser (I use Firebug in Firefox), and/or downloading the video file directly and noting the improved download speed. I see the video is presented using the Pano player. I’m not familiar with that, but I’d suggest contacting their support team to confirm the behaviour seen is expected, and to see can it be optimised.

We have exported the output file and uploaded this to the AWS, then launched via the index file. We did try uploading to our own servers first but the playback was awful, thus working with Amazon to host the files.

Any help would be great as this is a real burner on the development of content using Pano2VR for us.

Kind regards

Stephen

Wed Nov 30, 2016 8:47 pm

Hi Stephen,
Ill forward this to the developers to have a look at.
Regards,
Hopki

3dnative · Wed Nov 30, 2016 8:55 pm

Thanks Hopki, much appreciated.

Wed Nov 30, 2016 11:08 pm

Our 360° video is on our personal hosted server and has similar behavior. Starts/stops 1- 2 second hesitation before downloading next chunk of video stream. Not a stable continuous stream.

Thank you for providing a plausible explanation.

Not a secure server:
Here is our 60 second video from iPower.com host in Boston Massachusetts USA :
http://360texas.com/gallery/swamp/index.html

Have found that once the 60 second video is downloaded to your computer... replay seems a lot smoother.

Thu Dec 01, 2016 10:47 am

The panorama player uses just a simple HTML5 video tag to play back the video (and then the video gets pushed into WebGL) so the whole playback is managed by the browser. I uploaded our panedia demo to S3 and at least for me it plays well
http://ggnometest.s3-website-eu-west-1. ... nedia2016/
I see a lot of range requests.

But I also see them on the simple video tag in an HTML page:

Code: Select all

<html>
<body>
<div>Simple video test</div>
<video width="960" height="480" controls autoplay loop>
  <source src="videos/Panedia_2016_Showreel-2k-high.mp4" type="video/mp4">
  Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>
</body>
</html>

See it in action: http://ggnometest.s3-website-eu-west-1. ... video.html

So I guess the problem is more the video encoding itself. I tried a lot of different encoders, and for me the most reliable files came from Photoshop and Apples compressor.

Svendus · Thu Dec 01, 2016 12:21 pm

in Firefox V 50.0.2 Windows 10
When Win Anniversary have installed its graphic driver att start (new sins Anniversary Update) we get this message:

A script on this page may be busy or have stopped responding. You can stop the script now,
open it in a debugger, or let the script continue.

and the Browser crashes

: 2016-12-01_12-04-15.png (12.29 KiB) Viewed 5852 times

When we uninstall this driver in the computer management and Scan for hardware changes
the system installs the NVIDIA driver and the video are playing
i think many W10 office PC's have difficult displaying 360 content

But my CPU are running crazy

3dnative · Fri Dec 02, 2016 12:21 pm

Thanks for the replies, however I'm not sure why some of them have been posted in my thread as they don't seem to have any relevance to my issue.

Hopki, did you manage to pass my issue over to the developer? my client and myself are very frustrated that Pano2VR is not working as it should be.

Cheers

Stephen

Fri Dec 02, 2016 2:39 pm

3dnative wrote:Thanks for the replies, however I'm not sure why some of them have been posted in my thread as they don't seem to have any relevance to my issue.

Hopki, did you manage to pass my issue over to the developer? my client and myself are very frustrated that Pano2VR is not working as it should be.

I am confused. Why is my answer not relevant? Hopki forward the post to me, and I answered it. What else do you need?

3dnative · Fri Dec 02, 2016 3:20 pm

Hi Thomas,

I've been awake for 24+ hours so a bit on the touchy side. Thank you for your feedback and I'll give your feedback a go.

Many thanks

Stephen

3dnative · Mon Dec 05, 2016 5:27 pm

Hi Thomas,

I've been in contact with AWS people and put forward your fix, in comparison the file size for your build is 300mb to our 2gb. They stated the following;

That video still stutters and plays slowly for me. Tracing the requests, I see a few small-ish requests for bits of the video, but one main request for seemingly the entire video file. There’s no overlapping concurrent requests as previously, but perhaps the video isn’t loading fast enough to play in real time?

So is the encoding output conducted with Pano or best to use the encoding tools you mentioned?

I was under the assumption that Pano could handle the output to create online tours. Your video is a single video, we are creating a tour comprising of several videos, so output is around 4.5gb at the moment. 4K is important for zoom functionality and quality.

Many thanks

Stephen

Tue Dec 06, 2016 9:59 pm

3dnative wrote: So is the encoding output conducted with Pano or best to use the encoding tools you mentioned?

I was under the assumption that Pano could handle the output to create online tours.

Streaming is not an easy topic, and for 4k it is better to use an external video encoder and play with the settings.

For the video playback: The browser is handling everything. You can just try a simple web page with a video tag (as I mentioned) to test the video by itself, so you can be sure that it plays well without the whole WebGL remapping.
What format is the video? 3x2 or equirectangular? Can you send me a link to the file (as PM) so that I can have a look?