Single publisher stream quality brought down by subscribers

Issues developing apps
1

I’m using OV to supply a WebRTC stream to viewers who are all granted subscriber roles. The broadcast machine is the only publisher and is set to stream at 1280x720 or 1920x1080.

The outgoing stream is fantastic when there are only a few viewers. When there are more than 5-6 viewers, or one is on a poor bandwidth, it brings down the quality for everyone. The VM has a huge amount of resources and isn’t going past 20% on anything. Bandwidth isn’t an issue either as VM and some users all on 10G LAN.

I was always under the impression that Kurento managed the downstream to each client and gave a reduced bitrate if required. It seems that actually the publisher reduces quality to match the poorest user. Publisher WebRTC stats object reports bandwidth limitation when we see quality drop but clearly isn’t at the publisher end.

I can see that MediaSoup offers multi bitrate at the publish side, but prices get pretty expensive when charging kicks in. Can Kurento be used to separate out the subscriber quality from the publisher?

Many thanks,

James

2

Hello @basicmonkey,

Kurento doesn’t support simulcast. So all subscribers share the same quality (the quality of the subscriber with worst networking conditions).

Mediasoup supports simulcast. So every subscriber will pick the best quality that suits for him.

Best regards

3

Thanks Micael.

I’ve pushed up the minimum bandwidth setting in our REST calls to avoid really bad quality drops.

I can’t use Mediasoup in OV as can’t get our Pro/Enterprise distribution working (as per other thread): No appropriate icecandidates on pro/enterprise in 2.19

Currently working on switch to Antmedia but their solution isn’t as integrated as yours.

4

In the entry you linked you just have tried PRO edition. Can you try with ENTERPRISE edition (in beta)?

If it is not working, we will help you to make it working.

Best regards