3CX Meeting Update - Improving Moderation, Solving Bandwidth Congestion

[LeonidasG_3CX]

We wanted to give you a quick update on our progress since publishing our 3CX WebMeeting roadmap. Our development team has certainly wasted no time and we are pleased that everything is moving along smoothly. Our focus has been on solving the issue of bandwidth congestion, especially for large meetings, as well as giving more control to moderators....

Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

 

[craigreilly]

Does WebMeeting max out at 720, or can it support Full HD 1080 cameras?

 

[LeonidasG_3CX]

It can support Full HD 1080p cameras just fine but not anything beyond this.

Bitrate and resolution are both adaptive and resolutions like 1080p, 720p, 480p or less are used depending on the amount of users in a meeting and each user's capabilities.

As an example, in a meeting 10 users where each user's image is quite tiny, there's almost no reason in sending 1Mbit @1080p or 720p. The smaller your image, the less you send, i think it makes sense.

This is a 3CX only feature.

 

[craigreilly]

Makes sense. I thought Total Conf did this too perhaps not.

 

[hogan71088]

It can support Full HD 1080p cameras just fine but not anything beyond this.

Bitrate and resolution are both adaptive and resolutions like 1080p, 720p, 480p or less are used depending on the amount of users in a meeting and each user's capabilities.

As an example, in a meeting 10 users where each user's image is quite tiny, there's almost no reason in sending 1Mbit @1080p or 720p. The smaller your image, the less you send, i think it makes sense.

This is a 3CX only feature.

Very similar to Avigilons HDSM for managing HD video streams for CCTV.

 

[LeonidasG_3CX]

After checking several other WebRTC based products, we've seen that none have this level of bandwidth management. Most products just set a max bitrate of 2.5Mbits upload or higher and assume you live somewhere where everyone has a fiber line directly plugged into their PC.


The above becomes more frustrating when you realize WebRTC itself does not manage low bandwidth situations or lossy situations well if you set a bitrate that's too high. See more info below:

• WebRTC is inherently adaptive and is able to increase/decrease resolution and bitrate whenever it needs to but it's not that good at doing this.
  
  In low bandwidth environments it'll fully saturate your upload speed to try and reach that 2.5Mbps max cap you put thus causing packet loss in both upload and download. This results in stuttery and robotic video or audio. Lowering this max bitrate cap to something within your capabilities ensures you have a stable video stream. WebRTC does not do this well and just tries to max out your connection.
  
  
• Due to the packet loss caused by the upload saturation above, you or others watching you will end up having a bad conferencing experience.

Tldr how all this works:

• Just like when watching something on Netflix or Youtube, if your download speed is not enough, it'll auto drop the quality to perfectly match your download capabilities a bit so you can have a smooth experience without video buffering issues, we are able to do the same but for uploading/streaming your video realtime.

This and a few more features like it are inbuilt into the 3CX MCU. I need to stress that this and more features like it are built in-house from 0 and in and are 3CX only features.

 

[3cx31]

Makes sense. I thought Total Conf did this too perhaps not.

You can move your meeting slider to "Quality" and under the advanced option enable 1080p option (this option is not a meeting option but a user preference!). Be aware that the meeting now will consume up to 4Mbps. This would requier in a 1:1 meeting that the other side can send in 2Mbps (upload). We have this enabled in our conference rooms between our office as it is a controlled enviroment.

 

[AlanLatteri]

When do we get self-hosted MCU?

 

[Saqqara]

When do we get self-hosted MCU?

Its still on our road map

No ETA