Video quality dropping to 150 Kbps when someone with poor connection joins

ahmxt
  • Edited

I typically share my camera stream to a 10-20 person room regularly, and I have a solid 11Mbps uplink bandwidth.

Starting about 3 days ago I started to notice that my camera quality drops for everyone in the room (all the way down to 150Kbps outbound rate) very regularly, like 5 seconds after starting my camera.

I also noticed in the Debug screen that this happens immediately when someone with a poor connection joins. Once they leave, the outbound rate climbs up to 1500Kbps. Even further, if I just stream to 2-3 people with solid connections, it hits 7080Kbps.

It's clear that Discord is severely lowering the outgoing rate for everyone when someone with a poor connection joins. What’s happening here? Is this a recent change? Why is discord not encoding for poor connectivity on its server and instead lowering my streamer bitrate? This is making the entire app unusable for communities despite personally having Nitro and boosting the server.

Below is a screenshot where you can see Outgoing Bitrate is regularly dropping when someone with the poor connection/>0 packet loss rate joins. 150Kbps is a joke.

 

This was fixed in an earlier release around June'21 (as the minimum bitrate was set to 1500kbps).

Now it is broken again with a release that happened late August'21 and the min bitrate is now 150kbps again.

Dear Discord Engineering team, this is a regression. Your algorithm is faultily determines the bitrate at the sender's site by looking at the minimum bitrate among all the recipients (or 150 kbps, whichever is larger). This results in a completely useless video streaming feature when there is someone with a spotty connection.

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Comments

2 comments

Date Votes
  • Storm3r

    Damn, pretty sad that this thread is getting no attention. The fact that they bragged about it being finally fixed and shortly after that being broken again, and they don't do anything about it, is just lazy and disgraceful.

    1
  • Pr0Sh00t3r

    How do you get to this debug screen ?

    0

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