We are please to roll out a big upgrade to our Payload Monitoring system that provides much more information to help you diagnose audio and video problems. We’re able to decode many more streams including Real, Quicktime, AAC and OGG feeds. You can view the current bitrate, buffer and playback times as well as current audio levels or video deviation. And we have graphs!
Read on for details.

The new Payload monitoring system is based on the opensource VLC media player and can play just about any stream that VLC can. (Flash support is still in beta and we hope to have it available soon) We’ve developed our own plugins that monitor the level of audio and deviation of video to send you alerts if either fails.

New Features

• Audio outage, video outage and buffering event tracking
• Current and average data bitrates
• Total bytes and packets received
• Track the amount of time it takes to start playing the stream from the initial request
• Track the initial amount of time it takes to buffer the stream
• Left / Right channel average and peak audio levels
• Measure video deviation (rough estimate right now, future revisions will use industry standard metrics)
• Current and total silent audio frames and duration
• Current and total frozen video frames and duration
• Measure audio and video quality as a function of dropped frames
• 24 Hour averages and graphs

More features are on the way such as meta data tracking, stream container and codec information, bitrate, buffering and playback time alerts and more. If there is a feature you need, just let us know.

 Take a peek at a gallery of screen shots featuring the Stream Details page with Payload metrics below.

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