Kitz Forum

Internet => General Internet => Topic started by: Weaver on January 02, 2020, 11:37:46 AM

Title: FaceTime poor performance
Post by: Weaver on January 02, 2020, 11:37:46 AM
I’m getting horrible video quality on Apple FaceTime video calls to Janet when she is just downstairs in the kitchen. Very low frame rate - say 2 frames per sec, and on the image I see of her I see vertical bars where pixels are missing. What could be causing this? Suspect low bandwidth obviously but it isn’t always that bad.

Could that be when she’s using 4G instead of Wi-Fi thus leaving all of the DSL bandwidth for me and also maybe the 3G/4G is (a lot) faster than a half share of DSL? I wonder, because she possibly won’t have any 4G in the kitchen I suspect, because of the thick stone walls in the way, although holes have been cut in them so there is a chance for 3G/4G signal in the house even downstairs especially if near an east-facing window.

One other thing. About the image of me that is being captured: I have low light levels in my bedroom and the iPad that I am using is pointing in the wrong direction for my face; I see that my face is too low down for my camera and thus is mostly off screen, so the screen is filled instead with an image of the ceiling which is covered in random shaped dots; I also see lots of noise in the image which I assume is due to the low light level. So a pretty random image and a noisy one to be transmitted by me to Janet and maybe very difficult to compress effectively. So maybe too taxing for the (half) bandwidth available because of lack of compression.

Here I am assuming that traffic goes out to the internet and back for both parties on the one link to the internet - our dsl pipe. If this were sane, it would simply be directly across the wireless LAN in two directions, so the constraint would be half of the Wi-Fi effective true data rate for IP PDUs and no internet at all. But sanity and competence is too much to expect.
Title: Re: FaceTime poor performance
Post by: Weaver on January 04, 2020, 01:33:00 AM
I asked my wife what her experience was, looking in the reverse direction, and she said that picture quality was fine, no vertical stripes such as I had seen. So that presumably destroys my theory ?

I can’t understand the asymmetry. ?

Perhaps I should just report it to Apple as a bug?
Title: Re: FaceTime poor performance
Post by: niemand on January 05, 2020, 03:31:50 PM
If it were a software issue I imagine there'd be people all over the place complaining about it.
Title: Re: FaceTime poor performance
Post by: Weaver on January 06, 2020, 05:31:31 AM
I would assume that it should simply drop the framerate until it can go no lower and then go to audio-only? So distorting the picture bizarrely in a structured fashion would be a bug, no?