Webcam freezing, webcam shrinking, webcam streaming error, video problems

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EIRwebconf

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Jul 30, 2013, 4:14:51 PM7/30/13
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BBB .81 beta 2
Quad core 2.66 with 4 gig of ram

I seem to remember reading about this in a post but could not find it again.
And there was no solution in what I had read.  So I post this as new.

After about one hour into the video call, the webcam stream became unstable.
The voice remained clear, but lost its sync and several of the webcam streams become
icon sized.  See pictures from a bbb session several days ago with the same symptoms.

The size of the webcam displayed became shrunken and by the lip sync you could
tell it was running way behind.  The number of people on video is less than 15 total.
It did not happen last week on Thursday with less than 10 people.

This has happened two times at least in the past two weeks with larger conferences. 
The connections to the bbb are coming in from Spain, Mexico, Peru, USA, Columbia, Germany and others.

The minimizing/freezing of the video, among others, is of the primary speaker who is located in the
same city as the server but at a remote location, not in house.  The server is connected
to Verizon Fios at 25 meg down and ?? up speed.

I have not seen the recording of this yet.  It is still processing.






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Fred Dixon

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Jul 30, 2013, 6:02:24 PM7/30/13
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Hi Gene,

Thanks for sharing this.  On July 13, we did a test between sites in Brazil, Ecuador, and Canada, see


and we were able to sustain multiple webcams for many hours.  

In this thread, the videos are also freezing after one hour


We'd like to dig deeper into your use cases.  Is there any pattern between the users?  Some thoughts are the version of Flash.  Are all users using the latest version of Flash?

We noticed in earlier tests that when one person joined from Ubuntu desktop (flash 11.2), at HD bandwidth it causes all other webcams to stop.


I'm wondering if you can confirm, or in the next session, have everyone uses Chrome, which is always running the latest version of Flash.  

Also, we'd be interested to work with you and log into your server (via SSH) and try and watch what is happening.  Are the videos all fine up to the one hour mark, and then they all start having problems.

Again Gene, thanks for sharing this.  There are differences at play between the scenarios, and we're keen to figure why the video streams are having problems .

Regards,... Fred










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Gene Schenk

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Jul 30, 2013, 7:27:43 PM7/30/13
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BBB developers/troubleshooters/users:

 

We will do another call on Thursday. Different group.

A call last Thursday was for 114 minutes with maximum of 6 webcam

that worked without a problem. 

 

Next Tuesday at 2pm we will do another call with the same group.

You may want to ssh into that conference if we are still flushing out

the problem.

 

I will get more info on what connections people have been using. 

Wifi, Cable, DSL? Windows or Ubuntu, what flash player, etc and

try to fill in a better picture.

 

Click here to listen

There is not much to see, only that people are dropping off, but not one at

a time.  In the recording they drop several at a time, minutes apart.

At about 77 minutes into the call, slightly less, several video feed are lost.  Not because

people left the call.  I was notified at about 80 minutes into the call that webcam feeds

were dropping off one at a time.  I logged in without any trouble and my video worked.

But I saw the problem with others that had been connected for an hour.

 

If there is any log you want me to send you, let me know.

 

I will see what more info I can dig up.

Thank you,

Gene

Gene Schenk

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Jul 31, 2013, 4:29:58 PM7/31/13
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The very first call/conference that was done with the version 81 beta 1 had

almost 30 people with 15 webcams.  There was no problem with the webcam

video feed.  After recalling this, the next time I do a call that will have more

than 8 people, as a test, I will do a complete restart of the system, not just

bbb.  It is possible the problem is with Ubuntu 10.04 and not bbb.  If it is a

memory related problem, maybe a fresh start may remedy the problem.

 

Has anyone that has experienced this problem, tried a complete reboot?

 

Eventually I want to go to 8 gigs of memory.

Fred Dixon

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Jul 31, 2013, 4:37:02 PM7/31/13
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Hi Gene,

I'm not sure it's memory related.  A 

  sudo bbb-conf --clean

will do a restart (and clean out log files).   You could run the command top on your server during the session to watch the memory.  


Regards,... Fred
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HostBBB.com

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Aug 1, 2013, 10:19:25 AM8/1/13
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Fred, how is Redis database and memory managed in .81,   I know that my customers with lots of meetings (250+day) have to purge the redis db weekly to gain back the ram as the DB grows.
 
Gene,  I use HTOP (apt get install htop) and with the issue you see the ram being consumed daily in .80.   on a 8gb configured system we noticed one the ram utilization got past the 5gb we started having some issues in server performance.  Not sure if things occasionally started paging or now.
 
Not sure its the issue. but worth checking.
 
regards,
Stephen

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Fred Dixon

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Aug 1, 2013, 10:04:36 PM8/1/13
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Hi Stephen,

Good news.  BigBlueButton 0.81 automatically cleans out redis for recordings older than 24 hours.  See



Regards,... Fred
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Felipe Cecagno

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Aug 2, 2013, 10:00:00 AM8/2/13
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Hi Fred,

Nice!
How does this script is called?
I know the rap-worker.rb is called by god (hehe), but I can't find where the cleanup.rb script is used.

Thank you!
Regards,


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Fred Dixon

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Aug 2, 2013, 10:13:35 AM8/2/13
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Hi Felipe,

You might be right.    I'll let Richard give the definitive answer on this one :-).

Cheers,... Fred

HostBBB.com

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Aug 3, 2013, 7:49:36 AM8/3/13
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I haven't looked at the code closely to see if script only deletes completed rap meetings.,  but an issue with cleaning out redis is if a meeting-ids ingest and processing is not done yet after the two days and you clear out the DB,  you can't build an events.xml right?   Currently we make sure all the meetings are done processing before deleting the large redis db weekly on .80
 
After redis is purged can you do a bbb-record --rebuild on a meeting?
 
regards,
Stephen


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Gustavo Salazar

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Aug 5, 2013, 12:01:07 PM8/5/13
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The sanity script deletes the keys of the recording after the events are archived in events.xml

For the moment I think it is the unique script that deletes all the keys stored in Redis.

If the sanity script fails, the admin of the server should find the cause of the problem and fix it before the keys are deleted manually or  using any custom script created by the admin.

You can execute a rebuild without problems, even if the redis keys are deleted,  if the recording was properly archived ( the events were stored in events.xml and other media files were stored in the raw dir).


2013/8/3 HostBBB.com <207...@gmail.com>
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Gustavo Salazar (Guga)

HostBBB.com

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Aug 6, 2013, 6:53:42 AM8/6/13
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Gustavo, thanks for the clarification, I was wondering what the sanity logs file were for..
 
Stephen

EIRwebconf

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Oct 3, 2013, 8:18:40 PM10/3/13
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FYI:

Today, Oct 3 2013, I was invited to use the BBB development server to see if the problems described would happen again during the conference.
The conference had about 12 people when the problems started and did not go away.  The number on the call with webcams was 12 when
all of a sudden we lost all but 2 people on the screen.  (Total on call was 18.)  And the problem never resolved itself.  The audio was not affected.
So, within 30 minutes the same problems were occurring while using the BBB server.  I immediately contacted the development team and
after their analysis of the situation they sent me the following message:

"Got it. Thanks (very much!) for sharing this.  There isn't much we can do for this current release.  The multi-media server we use, red5, has some recent updates that may address this issue, but we won't know until we upgrade.  We'll let you know as soon as we have a build you can try out....."

Fred Dixon

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Oct 3, 2013, 9:30:09 PM10/3/13
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I wrote that message to Gene.  We look forward to testing again with the next release.

Regards,... Fred



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EIRwebconf

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Oct 4, 2013, 11:23:49 AM10/4/13
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Later in the day we did another conference on our dedicated server that had 15 participants, 7 on webcam and we had no problems.
We will continue to use the BBB platform and despite any problems we have had with the video, it accomplishes
what we need and has been an excellent choice for our communication needs across several continents.
Thank you to the BBB development team.
Gene in VA.

Fred Dixon

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Aug 18, 2014, 5:08:53 PM8/18/14
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Hi Gene,

Would it be possible to do another test with a build of 0.9.0-dev?  We've made a substantial number of improvements -- both to BigBlueButton and by shifting to Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit.  

You can test against


and use one of the sample rooms


Regards,... Fred


On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 4:29 PM, Gene Schenk <genes...@larouchepub.com> wrote:

Gene Schenk

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Nov 3, 2014, 10:11:54 AM11/3/14
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Hello Fred, et al.

 

I have set up a new server with .9, used it as our primary server, and have not had any problems

with people complaining about the webcam functions.  All is well on that front.

 

On a couple of other housekeeping matters:

 

I do want to transfer from the .81 server to the .9 the old recordings

and will need your advice on how to transfer and make them playable.

From 80 to 81 was an upgrade and this change is a transfer from old to new,

not an upgrade.

 

(Also, I seem to remember we had to run a special installation script to make recordings

playable from previous versions when we upgraded to .81.)

 

Should I create a new topic so you can respond or is there already

a topic that covers the transfer of old recordings to the new for 81 to 90?

 

It would also be helpful if I could transfer only recordings that I want to

keep and delete the extraneous recordings completely from the system.

I know you have commented on the problem of doing this, because of

multiple files for one recording.  Is there a script that removes all the

relevant files of a particular recording? Or some procedure

that can be used to accomplish this removal of files?

 

Thank all of you for your work,

Gene in Virginia

 

From: bigbluebu...@googlegroups.com [mailto:bigbluebu...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Fred Dixon
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2014 5:09 PM
To: BigBlueButton-users
Subject: Re: [bigbluebutton-users] Webcam freezing, webcam shrinking, webcam streaming error, video problems

 

Hi Gene,

 

Would it be possible to do another test with a build of 0.9.0-dev?  We've made a substantial number of improvements -- both to BigBlueButton and by shifting to Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit.  

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

Chad Pilkey

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Nov 4, 2014, 12:06:49 PM11/4/14
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You should be able to just copy the the directories in /var/bigbluebutton/published from your 0.81 server to the same location on your 0.9.0 server.

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Gene Schenk

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Nov 4, 2014, 12:36:10 PM11/4/14
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Thank you.  What about playback of those files?

Will the new .90 be able to play the old .8 and .81 recordings

without any changes?

Gene

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Chad Pilkey

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Nov 4, 2014, 12:51:17 PM11/4/14
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To support the playback of 0.8 recordings you will need to copy the playback format from /var/bigbluebutton/playback/slides to your new server. Someone else might correct me, but I don't think the format changed drastically from 0.81 -> 0.9.0

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Fred Dixon

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Nov 4, 2014, 2:13:21 PM11/4/14
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Hi Gene,

There's an outstanding pull request to make importing of 0.81 recordings into a 0.9.0-beta.  See


Once this gets tested and merged, you should be able to copy over 0.81 recordings to a 0.9.0-beta server.


Regards,... Fred

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