We’re changing the format our streaming radio feeds at the moment and our test player kept jumping. We were a bit stumped as to what could be going on as the same code runs our current listen again functionality.
Delving into the ActionScript 3 code, we discovered that it appears to be down to how we implemented the NetStream object that handles the live stream. There is a variation between a live publishing stream and an archive subscribing stream and how they work with the buffer.
On a subscribing stream, the bufferTime attribute specifies how long to buffer incoming data before starting to display the stream. However, on a publishing stream, bufferTime specifies how long the outgoing buffer can grow before the application starts dropping frames.
We had our bufferTime set too low, the default is 0.1. We have now upped this and our problems have gone.
See the Adobe reference site for more information on the ActionScript 3 NetStream bufferTime attribute.