Understanding the Buffer
Buffer Lifecycle Explained
4 min
The buffer transitions through distinct states: empty, filling, live, degraded, draining, and splash. Understanding these states helps you monitor and troubleshoot your stream.
Key Points
✓Empty: no segments uploaded yet, waiting for first chunk
✓Filling: segments arriving, buffer building toward capacity
✓Live: buffer at capacity, relay actively forwarding to platform
✓Degraded: upload rate slower than consumption, buffer shrinking
Details
The transition from filling to live triggers the relay to start its FFmpeg process, which begins outputting RTMP to your streaming platform.
When the buffer empties completely, the relay switches to the splash fallback to keep the RTMP connection alive.