FAQs: Video FAQs

Choppy call audio is usually jitter, not bandwidth. See how a jitter buffer reorders and paces packets, how it picks its size, and how it conceals lost packets.

Frame rate controls one specific property of video, how densely motion gets sampled over time, and most decisions around it get easier once you know which one. This covers what frame rate measures, how it differs from resolution and bitrate, how to pick a rate, and the bugs that come from treating fps as one uniform number.

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