[Osmf-talk] BigBlueButton audio issues

[Allan Mustard]

Michael,

A few questions:

1) Were sound interruptions consistent across speakers?  You wrote "some
people"--were the same speakers affected, or did it vary by speaker?  If
so, which speakers?  We would like to troubleshoot this.

2) BBB has low-bandwidth options at the client level, for shutting off
the video feed, for example.  We may want to experiment with that as well.

3) My connection was fine, and I detected no interruptions.  I used my
HP Omen notebook, Chrome, and a Verizon broadband connection over wifi
including a range extender.

The BBB documentation
(https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/support/faq.html#how-many-simultaneous-users-can-bigbluebutton-support)
says a server supports up to 150 participants simultaneously, but no
more than 100 per session, with some caveats related to how many are
sending video.  We had about 30 on a single session, of whom only 7
board members and a few intermittent guests were sending video.  Thus we
should not have been anywhere near the outer limits of BBB's capacity. 

I was first introduced to BBB by OSM India, which used it for my
videoconference with about 20 OSM India members.  It was very smooth,
with no problems, which really impressed me given my experience of three
years in New Delhi dealing with the slow and flaky local DSL connection. 

Would you be interested in helping troubleshoot this?

cheers,
apm

On 4/17/2020 1:33 PM, Michael Reichert wrote:
> 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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> osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
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