ProxySG treats BBC iPlayer Flash content as HTTP

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Article ID: 166824

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Updated On:

Products

ProxySG Software - SGOS

Issue/Introduction

The ProxySG appliance treats live streaming Flash content in the BBC iPlayer as HTTP. In addition, Blue Coat's Flash stream splitting functionality does not work correctly and shows no bandwidth savings.

These issues occur because the Adobe Flash platform was updated to use the HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) protocol for streaming Flash content.

Resolution

The ProxySG appliance only recognizes Flash content using Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) ; thus, it sees the iPlayer live stream as an HTTP connection. As a result, the ProxySG caches the content as it would a standard web page.

To work around this issue, install the following policy:

<Cache>
                 url.extension="bootstrap" cache(no)
                 url.extension="f4m" cache(no)
                             condition=adobe_hds_request  force_cache(yes)
define condition adobe_hds_request
                 url.path.regex="Seg[0-9]+-Frag[0-9]"
            end

After you install the policy, Flash content still shows as HTTP; however, you will see bandwidth savings when multiple connections are made.