Video stream freezes after some seconds

[Felix Wolff]

Hi,

I am experiencing the following behavior in my network at work: when I start the videoroom demo on meetecho and a second client joins the room, the video streams for some seconds, then it freezes. There is maybe one frame every 5 seconds. The audio is fine. This happens with the demo you are hosting, but also when I host it by myself on a Digital Ocean server (which is physically closer to San Francisco, where I work). When I run the gateway inside the private network, it works just fine. 

I know that it is really hard to analyze the problem, since it might be network related, but maybe you have any idea what it could be or what could help? The network here is really crappy, but it is actually not a problem to have a video conference with several people.

Best,

Felix

[Lorenzo Miniero]

The default video room in Janus has an automatic FIR/PLI sent every 10 seconds, which is probably "overkill", as the same FIR/PLI is also triggered when it's really necessary (e.g., anytime a new participant joins or a recording is started), and key frames are bandwidth expensive. You may want to increase the fir_freq value in the configuration file to a higher value and see if this improves things for you.

L.

[Felix Wolff]

It looks like I just receive the key frames and nothing else. When I set it higher, it freezes for an even longer time, set it to zero, it freezes for ever. When I set it to 1, I get one frame per second. 

[Lorenzo Miniero]

Not sure what's happening, I guess you'll have to have a look th Wireshark to see if packets are indeed flowing. Checking what the webrtc-internals or about:webrtc have to say about that may also help.

L.

[Gatecrasher777]

Have also experienced poor video playback with the videoroom plugin. Video freezes constantly, although with some short periods where playback seems acceptable. It does appear to be on the playback side where the problem lies, since the recordings of the video itself seem to be smooth and of good quality. It happens whether the browser is Firefox or Chrome.

[Gatecrasher777]

These are samples using two different ISPs, showing the vast difference between frames received and frames decoded in Chrome. I think it is this difference that is causing the video freezes.  There doesn't seem to be any issues with audio.  Echo test does much better than the videoroom plugin with a fairly close resemblance between the two graphs in Chrome. Although on Firefox, the echo test performs poorly.

[Gatecrasher777]

Is this being looked at? Or would it be more convenient to open it as an issue on Github?

[Lorenzo Miniero]

Sorry, currently busy at the IETF meeting so won't be able to check anything before a week.

A Github issue might be useful,

L.