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Video Call via Phone VIDEO QUALITY - How to get good quality video call from phone?
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lestra  
#1 Posted : Friday, January 10, 2020 7:26:46 PM(UTC)
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I was really impressed with vMix Video Call when I tried it for the first time. It is a simple solution and it opened many possibilities in live production. BUT...video quality coming from different devices vary significantly. For example:

vMix to vMix = Very Good
Desktop/laptop with good web camera = Good
Phone = From Bad to Acceptable

And here we have the problem. Best option will be to use phones to get guests to vMix but video quality doesn't match professional-semiprofessional criteria.
What can we do? I find that using different phone models gives different results. Phone must have a good camera and light but also it must use hardware encoding to produce HD (1280x720) video stream via WebRTC protocol.

Here iphone is better solution, but not everyone have iphone. Which android phones can do hardware encoding-acceleration? How to know?
Then there is different codecs used: VP8, H264, VP9, how to take control over encoder settings of the phone?

Many questions comes to mind but lets start with these.
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mjgraves  
#2 Posted : Saturday, January 11, 2020 1:36:06 AM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: lestra Go to Quoted Post
Here iphone is better solution, but not everyone have iphone. Which android phones can do hardware encoding-acceleration? How to know?
Then there is different codecs used: VP8, H264, VP9, how to take control over encoder settings of the phone?


You have no control over this. You cannot have control over this. vMix Call leverages WebRTC. In WebRTC, much of how things work are predetermined.

You want more control, don't use phones as cameras. Use REAL cameras. Use SRT.

Or use an RTMP camera application and accept the associated latency.

You know the old rule; time/convenience, money, quality. You only get to have two of the three.
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lestra  
#3 Posted : Saturday, January 11, 2020 3:16:33 AM(UTC)
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Now this become more interesting. I take really old phone, Samsung Galaxy 5, installed Wowza Gocoder app on it, and made new test aplication on Wowza Streaming Engine. In Wowza Gocoder app on the phone I used this settings:

Resolution: 1920x1080
Frame Rate: 30fps
Bitrate: 5000kbps

Then I started RTMP streaming from phone to Wowza server. For watching stream I used VLC player on my desktop PC. Video was nice and smooth. Wow! But latency was about 30-40sec.

I don't understand why webRTC have such limitations? It is better for latency but video quality is so bad.
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elvis55  
#4 Posted : Saturday, January 11, 2020 3:59:22 AM(UTC)
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sinc747  
#5 Posted : Saturday, January 11, 2020 5:40:37 AM(UTC)
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Also remember that Google Chrome dynamically adjusts the video resolution depending on the available bandwidth, so a "good" phone may perform poorly when it cannot get a good signal.

- Tom
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mjgraves  
#6 Posted : Saturday, January 11, 2020 5:43:03 AM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: lestra Go to Quoted Post
Now this become more interesting. I take really old phone, Samsung Galaxy 5, installed Wowza Gocoder app on it, and made new test aplication on Wowza Streaming Engine. In Wowza Gocoder app on the phone I used this settings:

Resolution: 1920x1080
Frame Rate: 30fps
Bitrate: 5000kbps

Then I started RTMP streaming from phone to Wowza server. For watching stream I used VLC player on my desktop PC. Video was nice and smooth. Wow! But latency was about 30-40sec.

I don't understand why webRTC have such limitations? It is better for latency but video quality is so bad.


I expect that you're using H264. Android phones have hardware acceleration for H264. WebRTC uses VP8/9.

You've just discovered that WebRTC stands for "web real-time communications." It was designed for real-time bi-directional communications, which requires low latency. It prioritizes real-time over quality.

It also operates in a browser, which is inherently less efficient than a native application.

Any form of LONG-GOP compression is inherently more efficient (better quality) but also higher latency.
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lestra  
#7 Posted : Saturday, January 11, 2020 6:48:21 AM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: sinc747 Go to Quoted Post
Also remember that Google Chrome dynamically adjusts the video resolution depending on the available bandwidth, so a "good" phone may perform poorly when it cannot get a good signal.

- Tom



I can see what you are talking about in the video call statistics. Resolution and bitrate vary all the time. But it is strange because signal is good and is the same phone/connection used in RTMP example without any glitch. Why? How to get constant 1280x720px resolution and max available bitrate? And also constant framerate?

Thanks everybody for answers, appreciated a lot.
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mjgraves  
#8 Posted : Friday, January 24, 2020 2:37:24 AM(UTC)
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Originally Posted by: lestra Go to Quoted Post
How to get constant 1280x720px resolution and max available bitrate? And also constant framerate?


Simple. Don't use a mobile phone.

vMix Call allows content contribution via a web browser. Nowhere was it promised that you'd achieve optimal results using a mobile phone.

For more control over the results, use camera connected to a real computer that has the resources to achieve what you desire. Also, use a reliable network and internet access.
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mavik  
#9 Posted : Friday, January 24, 2020 5:19:17 AM(UTC)
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Try Larix Broadcaster with SRT

URL: SRT://[ip]:[Port]

In vMix add an SRT input as typ listener on the same port used above. Keep in mind that you need to open and forward the port in your router to your vmix machine.
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mavik  
#10 Posted : Friday, January 24, 2020 4:50:21 PM(UTC)
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I recorded a short video of how this is working.
https://www.facebook.com/mavikav
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