[Osmf-talk] BigBlueButton audio issues

[Michael Reichert]

Hi,

I joined the board meeting which took place via BigBlueButton (BBB)
today. It was my first time using BBB at all. In the past I have been
using Jitsi a few time at Geofabrik at our own, password protected
instance with up to 5 participants and about 10 users on a different
non-public instance.

I did not observe video issues during the board meeting as I am used to
with Jitsi. This means, there were no users forced to reconnect because
they saw frozen video streams only (but sound still working and others
still seeing normal video streams).

However, I observed audio issues with BBB. They impaired my ability to
understand some people heavily. If my English were not as good as it is
now, I would not have been able to understand them at all. The sound by
some people was interrupted for fractions of a second almost every
second making following them very difficult. I observed the issues with
almost any board member but not all the time.

I changed my connection from wifi [1] to LAN to exclude any radio
related issues but it did not resolve the problem. My notebook was not
at 100% CPU. I was using Firefox and a Deutsche Telekom VDSL 50 MBit [2]
as single user in the house.

I have not observed these issues with Mumble for the last few years.
There had been issues with single Mumble users during a conference but,
as said, they were limited to single users only. I presume that the
presence of video streams needing to be transmitted to the recipients
takes to much bandwith and, in contrast to Jitsi, audio is not
prioritised although it being way more important for understanding than
a smoothly moving image. However, I have no proofs for that theory and
the used BBB instance being overloaded or its network connectivity could
be another potential reason.

Did anyone else have similar issues?

Best regards

Michael


[1] Detached house, not a large apartment building. ;-)
[2] AS3320 is known for its bad peering policy. This can contribute to
issues.

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