Amazon Cloudfront - Video Streaming (rtmp) Issue?

28 May 2013

Are you using Amazon Cloudfront for public/private video streaming over rtmp? Having trouble to figure out why some of your videos fail to stream (over rtmp) and throw 'Stream not found'  flash/actionscript client side errors?

I have figured out:

• Videos with invalid chapter markers would not stream over rtmp (Adobe Flash Media Server) or via Cloudfront.
• Adobe's FLVCheck utility suggests our videos have invalid chapter markers. I am not sure, if chapter markers in our videos are invalid or Adobe Media Server expect those to be in different format.
• Same set of videos play fine with Quicktime/VLC player, Adobe Flash Player (over http progressive download) and html5 player (chrome or others which support H.264 videos)

I am disappointed with the fact - Adobe Media Server ceases to play (core feature) a video because of (optional feature?) chapter marker(s) which can be ignored if it is corrupt or invalid.

Thanks to AWS engineers who confirmed the case, and provided more details.

Update: Thanks to Justin Riley for sharing a solution (in comments below). He suggested to use '-map_chapters -1' to get rid of this issue. It works for me.