I'm streaming videos via rtmp from Amazon Cloudfront. Videos are taking a loooong time to start playing, and I don't have any way of figuring out why. Normally I'd use the "Net" panel in Firebug or Web Inspector to get a good first impression of when an asset starts to load and how long it takes to be sent (which can indicate whether the problem is on the server end or network versus the browser rendering). But since the video is played within a Flash player (Flowplayer in this case), it's not possible to glean any info about the status of the stream. Also since it's served from Amazon Cloudfront, I can't put any kind of debugging or measuring tools on the server (if such a tool even exists).
So... my question is: what are some ways I can go about investigating this problem? I'm hoping there would be some settings I can tweak on either the front-end (flowplayer) or back-end (Cloudfront), but without being able to measure anything or even understand where the problem is, I'm at a loss as to what those could be.
Any ideas for how to troubleshoot streaming video performance?
You can use WireShark (can diessect RTMP) or Fiddler to check what is going on... another point (besides the client and the server) to keep in mind is your ISP.
To dig deeper you can use this http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/ OR http://www.fluorinefx.com/ OR http://www.broccoliproducts.com/softnotebook/rtmpclient/rtmpclient.php.
You need to keep in mind that RTMP isn't ideal since it usually bypasses proxies and tries to make direct connection... if this doesn't work it can fallback, but that means that some time has already passed (it wait for a connection timeout etc.)... if you have an option to set CloudFront/Flowplayer to RTMPT then I would recommend doing so since that uses Port 80 for the connection.