Bruteforcing bad streams

[Wyyyned]

Have you read the Tutorials?
Yes

Have you read the FAQ and checked for duplicate open issues?
Yes

What version of Shaka Player are you using?
4.8.3

What browser and OS are you using?
Chrome 122

Please ask your question
Is it possible to play some streams even if the server is bad and not caring for the best playback performance?.

https://shaka-player-demo.appspot.com/demo/#asset=http://168.232.168.242:4000/play/a00m/index.m3u8;panel=CUSTOM%20CONTENT;build=uncompiled (the url its from a random site but there are many streams that behave the same). On this demo it doesnt even start playback and there are buffer range errors. Thanks!

[joeyparrish]

I don't know what you mean by "brute forcing" the stream. What do you expect the player to do?

If the expectation is "take arbitrary, non-conformant garbage and make it play correctly somehow"... that's not a reasonable expectation. 😁

If you can be more specific and tell us what you'd like to be done differently, or how we should interpret a given stream to make it play, I'd be happy to listen and consider it.

[Wyyyned]

Well VLC and SS IPTV play those streams without hesitation, I was mostly wondering how ssiptv does it because it's html based im pretty sure, and I was trying to replicate that with shaka

[joeyparrish]

VLC is known for error recovery, error masking, and tolerance. It's excellent at that, and it basically always has been. VLC also owns the demuxers & decoders, whereas Shaka Player relies on the browser for demuxing and decoding. If the browser doesn't tolerate your stream, there's very little we can do about that.

We can do some amount of transmuxing for TS content and packed audio streams for compatibility, but we can't, in general, fix a broken container, and we definitely have no way to fix an encoded bitstream. In fact, the same browser can have different decoder implementations on different operating systems. You might have a hardware decoder on Android, but software for the same codec on Linux. And hardware decoders tend to be much less forgiving.

In many cases, if you control the content, you might find re-encoding it from the original sources with an updated encoder can fix many problems with a non-compliant bitstream. For example, many of Shaka's VP9 demo assets were failing to decode on some platforms, and we fixed it by updating libvpx and ffmpeg and re-encoding them from their sources.

I hope this helps!

[Wyyyned]

Thank you so much for the information it's very useful!, I ended up doing some reverse on the ssiptv source and it's very hacky to make work different streams on diverse TV brands, with that particular stream removing /index.m3u8 works don't ask me why, so it's just a matter of debugging!