YouTube max stream archive length is 12 hours. Summer videos are truncated in the evenings.

[tfabris]

I think that YouTube limits the total livestream length to 12 hours max. I'm not certain of this, but evidence seems to bear this out: During the summer months, my stream archives all end before the 12-hour mark.

It means that during the summer months, if my daily live stream starts and stops with the sun, then by the end of the day the stream is kaput, since days are longer than 12 hours during the summer.

Ideas:

• The code used to have a midday stream bounce, but I took it out. I could theoretically figure out how to put it back in. This runs the risk of missing some action around noon each day, but probably not a big deal.
• If I put a midday stream bounce back in, I'd have to think about how to do it well. I used to do it at solar noon, but that's not an easy thing to google, and I've been happy about how googling the sunrise/sunset has worked for me so far.
• Idea: divide the day's "number of seconds" between stream start time, and stream end time, by two. That's our "halftime" point. Then save a timestamp every time the stream is started. Either when turning on the stream for sunrise, or when bouncing the stream due to problems. Then, perform a bounce if the most recent "stream start" has been longer ago than $halftime seconds. This would allow us to have the stream split at the halfway point if the stream is working well today, and it would allow the stream to NOT split if it was bounced at some point this morning and now the overall length is short enough so that the stream won't overshoot the evening tail.
• Alternatively: I could just shine it on because the activity in the early evening is low, and I don't care if the stream craps out before sunset.

[tfabris]

The most recent checkin should address this issue. I need to test it in production and watch how it behaves, but I'm closing the bug for now.

[tfabris]

Reopen this to check one particular thing:

• On 2019-05-20 there is a video stream here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTYOhepn0Ok
• That video stream runs for 11 hours and 55 minutes total. It starts at sunrise and goes until the time length limit is hit. The video lasts all day. The video ends before 12 hours is hit, as expected.
• Unexpected: There is another video here from the same date, starting at 6:53 pm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdmDtebR79s

Question: Was the second video created due to a stream bounce on my part? Or was the second video automatically created by YouTube when the first video got truncated? My guess is that it was a stream bounce and I still need to move ahead with my new "midday split" code.

To do:

• Look at the logs to answer that question.

[tfabris]

Looked at the logs. There was indeed a stream bounce 2019-05-20 6:50pm.

Will proceed with putting into production the code for the midday split.

[tfabris]

Update: needing to increase the bounce time higher than 95 seconds. On 2019-05-24, the stream didn't "split" during the bounce.