Cranking up Red5 video quality?

Hello all.

After a lot of reading and restarting services, I’ve finally got Red5, OpenFire, and Spark playing nicely. OpenFire and Red5 are running on a Win2k3 box with lots of available RAM and bandwidth. However, I can’t seem to get video quality where I’d like it.

I’m running Red5 v0.1.08 on OpenFire v3.6.3. I have the following set under “Video Parameters”:

Bandwidth: 60000

Frames/Sec: 30

Picture Quality: 1

As I understand it, that should get a pretty clear picture, yet I still have a seriously pixelated image (see attached).

I have about 30 mb/s of available download bandwidth and about 3 mb/s available upload bandwidth. A variety of speedtests net me a result of 20ms ping times and 32000k down / 3500k up. I have QoS setup with ports 1935 and 7070 as highest priority (the only thing higher is my VOIP packets, which are not currently being used).

The attached pic is from another computer on my network, so I’m 99.9% certain that bandwidth is not an issue, as I run gigabit Ethernet on my local network.

Any suggestions?

From Adobe’s documentation:

  • To indicate that bandwidth use takes precedence, pass a value for bandwidth and 0 for frameQuality. Flash will transmit video at the highest quality possible within the specified bandwidth. If necessary, Flash will reduce picture quality to avoid exceeding the specified bandwidth. In general, as motion increases, quality decreases.
  • To indicate that quality takes precedence, pass 0 for bandwidth and a numeric value for frameQuality. Flash will use as much bandwidth as required to maintain the specified quality. If necessary, Flash will reduce the frame rate to maintain picture quality. In general, as motion increases, bandwidth use also increases.
  • To specify that both bandwidth and quality are equally important, pass numeric values for both parameters. Flash will transmit video that achieves the specified quality and that doesn’t exceed the specified bandwidth. If necessary, Flash will reduce the frame rate to maintain picture quality without exceeding the specified bandwidth.

I suspect that you need your picture qulaity to be 0 to use specified bandwidth

Thanks for the reply, but I’m a bit confused as to why you’d quote Adobe’s documentation.

I’m editing settings in the Red5 configuration page in the OpenFire admin console. Under the particular setting you’re referring to, there appears to be two choices: 0 or 1. Here is the explanation of the setting in the console:

“Camera picture quality: a value between 0 and 1, where 1 represents the highest quality (no compression). When 0 is passed, this indicates to use highest quality that fits into the available bandwidth”

By default, the setting is put to 0. I changed it to 1, because “1 represents the highest quality”. Just to try your suggestion, I put it back to 0. It seemed to make no difference, even though I restarted the Red5 service as well as the OpenFire service.

Still not sure what the best combo of settings is. I’ve tried a variety of different settings, and there doesn’t seem to be marked improvement of any kind… even from two PCs inside the network.

Ok, now I’m completely stupified. I cannot get the picture quality to change one way or the other. I’ve gone back to the default settings of 24000 bandwidth, 15 fps, and 0 for quality. It seems to be “stuck” on blocky.

Other than the interface in the OpenFire console, where else can I access these settings? Is there a config file the entries on the console changes?

(Good work, by the way. Definitely cool to at least get it working!)