NC Talk: Poor Audio/Video Quality with More Than Two Users

ℹ️ Support 💬 Talk (spreed)
1

Hello,

I have a clean install of NextCloud 17 running on a DigitalOcean VPS with 1GB Ram + 1GB swap. It has light use, mostly for testing.

I have two coTurn servers setup, one on the same VPS and one on seperate network, both of which I am able to test (STUN + TURN) and from logs are successfully working.

Speedtest shows results of 3000+ for up/down on DO, so ample bandwidth available.

Video and audio quality is fine for 2 users. At 3+ users, it is completely unusable. Audio is out of sync, video is very choppy.

Summary of browser testing results:
*All Safari, completely unusable. Video blacks out after a few minutes for everybody, even at 2 users
*All Chrome, works great for 2 people. Does not work for 3+
*All Firefox, works great for 2 people, “okay” for 3, and does not work at 4+

Mobile apps:
*iOS app, works with 2 but will randomly disconnect; doesn’t work with 3+
*iPadOS app, works with 2, with 3 it’s “okay” but video is very choppy, and 4+ doesn’t work

Needless to say, these are not good results at all. It seems the consistent answer is a signaling server that you have to purchase.

Any suggestions at all here as to how to improve the performance? I have read that with coTurn it should easily be able to handle 4 users, but this does not seem to be the case from my testing.

2

From what I read the problem doesn’t seem to be bandwidth or peer discovery, but the peer connections as every client has to stream to every other client. I guess this is rather heavy on the CPU and individual machines. The “high performance backend” (as well as others like Zoom, Jitsi, etc.) circumvent this problem by managing the streams through a central server.

3

Similar results here perhaps a bit better.
3 users still good audio and video, unable to add 4th user without major blackouts. Many talked about up to 5 users would be feasible, but no joy. It is a pity. Tried to get 3 family members to join me during Easter and failed miserably. Only good to cater for two members joining me at the time. Tried many different setups from mobiles to desktops with Firefox and Chrome etc. It doesn’t make a lot of difference to get you past 3 simultaneous users.

Will be working on installing Jitsi or BBB which include a central server I understand. Need to re-establish a reputation in the family here :wink:

2 Likes
4

Completely understand, I think many people were trying what you were around the holiday and probably got a similar result.

Jitsi is not an option for me, as Safari is not even a focus area for them. Would be interested to see your setup for BBB. Seems like pretty heavy minimum specs but would be interested in seeing results.

5

I’ve read it is now, with Firefox. You may try meet.jit.si to test with their lastest version, from yesterday I think.

1 Like
6

Talk 8.0.9 should be a big improvement, hopefully letting you scale to 7-10 users thanks to automatic video quality adjustments and other improvements.

Many scaling problems should be solved by 8.0.9, released last week - it adjusts quality based on the nr of participants, among other things. A typical network and hardware setup should handle 5-10 people.

See also Talk 9 brings grid view, file editing, open sources Talk back-end - Nextcloud

1 Like
7

Wow, did not expect all of that. That is big news for Nextcloud!