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Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

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Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#11

Post by hideo »

lazyeye wrote: post #4

Someone needs to design vidconf hardware where (somehow) the camera is in the middle of the screen so you are looking directly into each other's eyes.

This exists in several forms ranging from TelePrompTer style settings to cameras embedded in the screen. They’re currently expensive but I’d expect to see them hitting the market in the next 5-10 years.

There are also software/post-processing implementations of this out there which try to emulate eye contact. The ones I saw 4-5 years ago were definitely uncanny valley but there may be more happening there of late.

This gets even more interesting in multi party situations where there may be 3+ locations with more than one person at each location

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#12

Post by algesten »

keithwinstein wrote: post #5

Low-latency packet video can work incredibly well over a dependable network connection (with a known constant throughput and no jitter), low end-to-end per-packet latency, and good isolation between everybody's microphone and speaker. This was mostly solved in the 1990s. A lot of what makes Skype/Facetime/WebRTC/Chrome suck are the compromises and complexity inherent in trying to do the best you can do for when these…

Well put! It's also worth mentioning that because of the network conditions, UDP is a better choice than TCP. The reason is that the retransmissions in TCP are not helping with real-time video.

However every protocol doing this must have fallback from UDP to TCP because there are a surprising amount of corporate firewalls out there that arbitrarily limits the use of UDP.

We worked extensively with webrtc, but are recently switching to our own protocol. The main reason is that webrtc is very complex and generic. You can make a better user experience if you adapt the protocol to target your use case.

Another reason is that we can more easily detect firewalls and give the user feedback about it.

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#13

Post by tracer4201 »

keithwinstein wrote: post #5

Low-latency packet video can work incredibly well over a dependable network connection (with a known constant throughput and no jitter), low end-to-end per-packet latency, and good isolation between everybody's microphone and speaker. This was mostly solved in the 1990s. A lot of what makes Skype/Facetime/WebRTC/Chrome suck are the compromises and complexity inherent in trying to do the best you can do for when these…

I bookmarked your link and the paper it links to for reading on my Monday commute.

In college, I had one Networks course which discussed IPs, subnets, cidr, UDP, TCP, various higher level protocols, packet headers, etc. There were a couple projects - I think I recall implementing TCP or sliding window. Anyway, that’s the extent of my background knowledge.

Where would one start if they want to dive deeper in video transmission or related topics that provide more than the very basic understanding I have?

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#14

Post by hardwaresofton »

keithwinstein wrote: post #5

Low-latency packet video can work incredibly well over a dependable network connection (with a known constant throughput and no jitter), low end-to-end per-packet latency, and good isolation between everybody's microphone and speaker. This was mostly solved in the 1990s. A lot of what makes Skype/Facetime/WebRTC/Chrome suck are the compromises and complexity inherent in trying to do the best you can do for when these…

Thanks for your work on the Salsify paper -- the paper was a great read and the novel approach is pretty great was illuminating.

I wonder if it would be possible to get Salsify into the browser using something like web-udp[0]. I don't think the lower level access to the encoder information is available to coordinate network usage...

For those who are interested in code, check out the encoder on Github[1].

[0]: https://github.com/osofour/web-udp

[1]: https://github.com/excamera/alfalfa

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#15

Post by sytelus »

The core issue is not technical but rather human. In 1960s Bell Labs poured in massive investment in trying to make video calls a reality. They solved virtually all technical issues - in 1960s - and had real system deployed in NYC and other places. Here was the issue it never took off: people just don't like others to see them although they like to see others.. This might feel funny little thing but it ultimately lead to pulling out video handsets from the market. No amount of network effect and marketting helped its adoption.

This experiment has been repeated in many forms by different companies in different settings with no real success. Everyone had solved tech issues, its just that screen resolution keeps increasing. The only area I can think of where video calls have minor success is corporate group meetings and talking to kids/parents but even in those cases people tend to be very selective when to do video calls vs voice-only calls.

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#16

Post by closeparen »

ColanR wrote: post #8
cameldrv wrote: post #3

Zoom and Facetime are pretty decent, but you are completely right. The fundamental problem is we have a huge stack of technologies that just barely work. It runs from USB to video drivers, to operating systems, to videoconferencing software to Wi-Fi to home/office routers to cable modems to cable infrastructure to TCP/IP to backbone network capacity, and back. Everything is pushed to the limit. It's basically the Ric…

Seems like we would do well to find a way to implement some kind of certification process, like we do with engineers. [1] If you lose your certification if you write low-quality code, then (hopefully, if the certifiers have the processes in place) you'd not write the code. In that way, we could finally compare the importance of quality in writing a device driver to the importance of quality in designing a bridge. [1]…

An engineer's job is to meet the customer's specification. Wasting its money to deliver something far in excess of the requirements is also a path to no longer working as an engineer.

You've no right to be angry at the engineer because you wish to drive a semi truck down what you commissioned and budgeted as a footbridge.

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#17

Post by faragon »

The biggest problem with videoconferencing is using movie video codecs (designed for maximizing compression, and not for multicast latency control) tuned/tweaked for the worst client. So the typical video conference server uses a hand tuned gstreamer and a mechanism for requesting key frames at the pace of the slowest client. That work okish for up to few hundreds of connections in the case of all peers having quality connections (fiber). Scalable video conference, with e.g. thousands of concurrent clients require a different problem approach, being solved eventually because of specialized video hardware acceleration in the video conference gateway server, changes in the network infrastructure, and also low latency devices at client side.

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#18

Post by isostatic »

lazyeye wrote: post #4

Someone needs to design vidconf hardware where (somehow) the camera is in the middle of the screen so you are looking directly into each other's eyes.

Get an autocue and set up your screen below and reflected, and camera as an external input.

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#19

Post by chvid »

That people don't really want it.

As far I can see it is possible and good enough today with Skype, FaceTime and so on plus a good internet connection; yet people prefer email, chat, telephone ... I think that is what is holding it back and because of the lack of demand there is not really big investment in create hardware and software to support it.

Re: Ask HN: What's preventing us from achieving seamless video communication?

#20

Post by pjc50 »

ColanR wrote: post #8
cameldrv wrote: post #3

Zoom and Facetime are pretty decent, but you are completely right. The fundamental problem is we have a huge stack of technologies that just barely work. It runs from USB to video drivers, to operating systems, to videoconferencing software to Wi-Fi to home/office routers to cable modems to cable infrastructure to TCP/IP to backbone network capacity, and back. Everything is pushed to the limit. It's basically the Ric…

Seems like we would do well to find a way to implement some kind of certification process, like we do with engineers. [1] If you lose your certification if you write low-quality code, then (hopefully, if the certifiers have the processes in place) you'd not write the code. In that way, we could finally compare the importance of quality in writing a device driver to the importance of quality in designing a bridge. [1]…

The public have consistently chosen the cheaper but slightly worse option for decades of technology. This, more so than engineer skill, puts an upper constraint on reliability.
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