OmniStream

Devices now resume after rebuffering on a cushion they can actually rebuild. The wait was a fixed 10 seconds on every device; it is now derived from what the device's video buffer can hold at the stream's measured bitrate — as low as 2.5 seconds, never longer than the previous 10. A box that can hold 17 seconds of a 50 Mbps remux is no longer asked for 10 of them before showing a frame. Stall detection now measures how fast the buffer is filling, not merely whether it moved. A source delivering under a fifth of real time is reconnected rather than waited on. A brief moment of playback between stalls no longer resets stall detection, so a stuttering source reaches recovery instead of cycling indefinitely. The rewind buffer is now taken from spare capacity instead of off the top, and starts at zero until the stream's bitrate is known — it can no longer crowd out the forward buffer on devices with little to spare. Disk prefetching releases the connection the moment playback stops, instead of up to four seconds later, and now also gives up a download in progress when the player's buffer is shrinking rather than waiting for the picture to stop.

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