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Showing posts from November, 2016

Controlling bandwidth usage in WebRTC (and how googSuspendBelowMinBitrate works)

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There are cases when we would like to limit the maximum bitrate being transmitted by WebRTC to avoid wasting resources in the user endpoints or save money reducing the bandwidth usage in our servers.   This is because the maximum bitrate by default in Chrome is around 2Mbps and for many use cases a much lower bitrate provides still pretty good quality.   BTW using a lower bitrate can also help with stability of quality in multiparty scenarios by reducing the amount of competition among different streams. There is no simple API to configure the maximum bitrate in WebRTC (although there is one in ORTC) but there are 3 ways to do this by mangling the SDP. 1. U se the standard  b=AS:BITRATE (Chrome) or b=TIAS:BITRATE  (Firefox) attributes in the SDP for the audio or video channel[1] 2. Use codec specific attributes (this work at least for opus audio codec with maxaveragebitrate property) [2] 3. Use the proprietary x-max-bitrate attribute in the video channel of the...