Cloud Playout: mid-item recovery, drift-free output, and reliable audio

Cloud Playout channels now recover mid-item after infrastructure restarts, hold steady RTMP output without drifting toward the live edge, and guarantee an audio track on every asset.

What’s new:

• Mid-item recovery: after a restart, a recovered channel resumes the item that was on air at the correct position (VOD trimmed to the right offset, live rejoined at the edge, bumpers per segment) instead of airing slate until the next scheduled boundary.

• Automatic channel recovery: on startup, active channels are rediscovered and restarted automatically, and the system verifies that content is actually flowing before reporting recovery complete.

• Guaranteed audio on every asset: assets without audio, whether VOD, slate, or live, get a silent audio track added during conversion, preventing video-only output sessions and the interruptions they caused.

• Resilient live transcode: live channels reconnect through late publishers and long outages and follow mid-event extensions, instead of cutting to slate after a short dropout.

• Channel health visibility: each channel reports its running state, output-pacing lead, and whether content is flowing, for monitoring.

Improvements:

• Drift-free RTMP output: output pacing is now driven by probed timestamps with a live-edge guard, eliminating the slow creep toward the live edge that accumulated over long runs.

• Hardened against defective assets: asset durations are cross-checked at ingest so broken assets are flagged before they reach air, with read timeouts and a retry to ride out transient issues.

• Reliable large and frequently-updated schedules: schedules are fetched in a rolling window instead of whole-day payloads, so big or rapidly-changing schedules no longer cause interruptions.

• Protected, self-healing slate: the custom slate is isolated so media cleanup can’t remove it, and missing slate segments are re-prepared automatically.

Fixes:

• Channels recover after restarts: a channel force-start after a restart no longer fails, since stale executions are cleared first.

• Removed loop-channel audio drift: trimming the audio tail at segment boundaries removes the small drift that caused segment expiry and corruption on looping channels.

• Failed channel starts surface an error: a channel that fails to start now reports an error to playout-manager instead of failing silently.