Improving P2P Video Chat in Bandwidth limited Situations

[esteimle]

I did a little work this past week to improve our performance, and automatically scale back our bandwidth usage when we were in low bandwidth situations.  Primarily we were trying to combat choppy audio, video delay, and low video framerate.   It turned into more work than I expected.

Anyway I thought I'd share our approach in hopes that other P2P video chat people here will do the same and we can all learn how to make a LCCS P2P video chat the best it can be.

Let me know what you think, if I suck, etc etc.

Here's a link to a pdf about it:  http://www.familyhealthnetwork.com/Improving_LCCS_P2P_Video_Chat_In_Bandwidth_Limited_Situations.pdf

-Eric

[Former Community Member]

Hi Eric,

Sorry for not responding earlier (we've been running around w/ hair on

fire... You'll all see why shortly...), but this is really amazing! Thanks a

ton for putting this together and sharing it with us.

Any technical reason to use XMPP as the message relay for the STFU? Seems

like a simple transient message via LCCS could work here.

I'd love to discuss this a little more deeply once the dust settles on our

side.

nigel

[esteimle]

Sure glad it's helpful. No technical reason for XMPP, in fact an LCCS

message is probably better. I just already knew how to send XMPP messages

so it was the easy route for me.

-Eric

[ablerman]

This is great! It's mostly what I expect, but it's nice to have my suspicions confirmed.

The only thing in it that's really worrisome is the stuff about the delay (Section 2.4). Is this an issue in the player? Or is it something LCCS that can be worked around/fixed?

-sandy

[esteimle]

My guess is it's in the player itself, you can trace it all the way back to

the netstream class. I could be wrong though, maybe one of the Adobe guys

can think of a way to flush that buffer without having to restart the

camera.

-Eric