Does poor network connection of some watchers affect overall WebRTC conference quality?

[dmitry027]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to set up conference app and wondering about the following scenario:

Let's say we have a room with 1 publisher publishing via WebRTC and 100 watchers watching the publisher stream via WebRTC.

Publisher have a good network connection, but some of watchers are not. As far as I know, WebRTC have built-in adaptive bitrate algorithm which forces publisher to decrease quality of the video if the peer have poor network connection.

Will the fact that some of watchers have poor network connection (high ping, low bandwidth) lead to a decrease in the quality of the stream which publisher sends to the server? So all watchers will see low-quality video even if most of them have pretty good network connection?

Edited April 5 by dmitry027
Fix format

[usama]

if the Conference is in SFU mode that mean a publisher will send its stream to Media Server and Media server in relay the stream to all the watchers in the room.

                                                              | ---------------watcher 1

publisher --------Media Server ----- | ---------------watcher 2

                                                               |---------------watcher 3

So there are  separate WebRTC connections going on here 1 from publisher to media server and 3 different WebRTC connection between all the 3 watchers in this case.

If the connection between publisher and media server is not good the publisher will adapt to a lower bit-rate and if the connection between server and one of the watcher is not good the stream will not be adapted to lower bit-rate if the adaptive bit-rate settings are not enabled on server side.

you can enable the adaptive bit rate settings if you are using enterprise version of ant media server.

If its an MCU based conference system then all the  audio video streams from publishers will be merged on server side and will be sent to client for playing.

I hope the answer was help full. 

 

Edited April 5 by usama

[dmitry027]

@usama thank you for the answer, it is really helpful!

So for SFU conference without adaptive streaming enabled, the fact that some particular watcher has poor network connection will lead just to lagging of their own video, while other watchers with good connectivity will be ok. Does that sound right?

[usama]

yes, you are right