UNless LMS has been corrupted or badly patched - reinstalling LMS or
plugins will do nothing for this problem.  Deleting some LMS cache may
help odd issues but AFAICT It is all about the BBC, the network and the
OS.

The Radiofeeds are MP3 streams.  So the stream is played with a single
HTTP GET which makes the server send bytes non stop on the same tcp
connection. MP3 is played natively on SB players so stream will probably
bypass LMS.

The BBC HLS is a chunked HTTP format which uses AAC audio format. 
Chunked HTTP means the stream is not continuous but made up of separate
"files" of about 3-6 secs of audio. Each file needs a HTTP  - which
means a separate DNS lookup and a TCP connection fro each "file". 
Futhermore ther strema siscontoilled by a playlist (m3u8 file)  which is
also fetched by a HTTP GET.  In the m3u8 playlist there are a few URLs
for the stream but since the live stream is non stop - the m3u8 has to
be refetched regularly with a HTTP get - possibly as often as once every
10 secs.

DNS caches will minimise DNS lookup but if the DNS lookup is slow then a
fetch will fail.  Some user reported Windows as ignoring the DNs
diretoiev and cachign info for too long resulting in out of date
fetches.

Some compare 30 secs of audio of MP3 which requires a single HTTP GET
and a single TCP connection and no transcoding.  30 secs on HLS stream -
probably has at least 10 HTTP get with 10 DNS lookups, 10 TCP connection
setup and torn down and then transcoding whichtakes at least 3 more
processes.

The replacement HLS.pm file has more generous timeouts and tries to do a
bit more buffering but most fo the problem seems to be on the BBC side
in certain regions and more frequent at certain times.  The problem has
not been identifed as it is non consistent but anecdotally it seemed to
be occur more often on Windows based systems but perhaps it is just more
Windows users reported.

The AAC audio stream cannot be played by older SB players such as SB
classic so AAC has to be transcoded. Transcoding on Windows uses with
faad and flac and possibly socketwrapper.


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