Continuity Count Errors

Recently I had an issue where I would up troubleshooting multicast with a TON of CC errors.  We were sending a 20 Mbps stream to a station, and they were only receiving 15 Mbps.  They were also sending 20 Mbps to us and we were receiving 15 Mbps.  It turns out the issue was circuit provisioning.  The EVPL circuit had a 15 Mbps multicast limit on it at the provider.  They switched it to EPL and life was good.  One of the things I learned at that point was how CC errors actually work.

CC Errors are Continuity Count errors in video.  This is generally caused by 1 of 2 things.  Either the video packets arrived out of order, or they packets were missing.  You can see the actual issue in a wire capture.

Every video TS frame has a counter in it.  In the above picture you can see that the Expert Info listed says Detected 5 missing TS frames before this.    The first Red highlighted line in wireshark shows CC=9 skip=5.  This is because we missed those 9 packets.

 

Also note in the picture the Captured vs displayed on the right.  This whole capture was this multicast stream which was over 41,000 packets.  The displayed packets at 29501 is the the amount of video that contained CC errors based on my filter.  So more then half of the packets contained errors even though in theory only 25% of the packets were missing.