Livestreamer

Common issues

Streams are buffering/lagging

By default most players do not cache the input from stdin, here is a few options you can pass to some common players:

  • MPlayer/mplayer2/mpv: --cache <kbytes> (between 1024 and 8192 is recommended)
  • VLC: --file-caching <milliseconds> (between 1000 and 10000 is recommended)
  • MPC-HC: It does not seem possible to configure the cache right now unfortunately

Use the --player option in Livestreamer to pass these options to the player.

Player specific issues

VLC fails to play with a error message

VLC version 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 contains a bug that prevents it from reading data from standard input. This has been fixed in version 2.0.3.

VLC hangs when buffering and no playback starts

Some versions of 64-bit VLC seem to be unable to read the stream created by rtmpdump. Using the 32-bit version of VLC is a workaround until this bug is fixed.

MPC-HC reports “File not found”

Upgrading to version 1.7 or newer will solve this issue since reading data from standard input is not supported in version 1.6.x of MPC-HC.

MPC-HC only plays sound on Twitch streams

Twitch sometimes returns badly muxed streams which may confuse players. The following workaround was contributed by MPC-HC developer kasper93:

To fix this problem go to options -> internal filters -> open splitter settings and increase “Stream Analysis Duration” this will let ffmpeg to properly detect all streams.

Using --player-passthrough hls has also been reported to work.