FAQs: Video FAQs

Echo happens because every device on a call plays and records audio at once, and the delay added by network transit and buffering is what makes the overlap audible instead of unnoticeable. This covers how acoustic echo cancellation works, WebRTC's default AEC3 pipeline, why users still hear echo, and how to fix it.

WebRTC promises a direct connection between two devices, and the internet makes that hard. ICE is the part of the stack that closes the gap, discovering candidate addresses, exchanging them, and testing pairs until it finds one that actually works. This covers how ICE works, STUN vs. TURN, Trickle ICE, and how to debug calls that won't connect.

Large group video calls stay under a few hundred milliseconds by moving the work onto the server. Here's how SFUs, WebRTC, and simulcast keep latency low.

It doesn't seem too long ago that a livestream was an "event." Something that required a dedicated team, dedicated hardware, and custom or enterprise software to run. And if your audience was anything more than a few thousand, the likelihood of failure rose significantly. Now, you could start a livestream in the next couple of

Bandwidth. Specifically, the cost of moving video segments from your origin servers to every concurrent viewer. It accounts for 50-70% of total infrastructure spend, and unlike transcoding or storage, it scales linearly with audience size. This is why Twitch has never turned a profit despite generating roughly $2 billion in annual revenue, and why it

"This is a very tough problem." That's from the top answer on Stack Overflow for this question. Granted, the answer is over 15 years old, but the sentiment is still true. This is a very tough problem. The problem stems from the fact that audio and video travel through completely separate pipelines in a real-time

H.265 has promised 50% smaller files at the same quality since 2013. In practice, the savings depend heavily on resolution, and the codec's messy patent licensing has slowed adoption enough that a royalty-free alternative (AV1) is already eating into its market share. Here's how the two codecs actually compare, and when each one makes sense.

The bright, natural lighting. The flat palm behind a lipstick. The countdown timer flashing to cause FOMO. The chat scrolling so fast it looks like the Matrix made of heart emojis. You know when you are in a live shopping event. Sometimes, the infrastructure knows as well. If implemented incorrectly, live shopping can (belt) buckle