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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?

#41

Post by no_identd »

1. Check out this recent comment thread from a few days ago for an entry point to learning about numerous performance bounds caused by both design limitations and extremely long standing feature gaps in the computer network protocols we nowadays use for global communications (I intentionally avoid the term "Internet" here, because, as one can hopefully gleam from the content linked to there, that name seems undeserving for our "global information superhighway"):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808

2. Something important and very relevant to your question which I forgot to mention in that thread:

https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/201807/D...

This recent ITU slide deck by Richard Li (Huawei):

https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/201807/D...

From this recent ITU workshop: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/201807/P...

The webcast of which you can find here:

https://www.itu.int/webcast/archive/t2017075g#video (third presentation in the video)

Naturally, given the information from point #1 on RINA, GNUnet & currently network technology issues combined with the fact that the plans presented above don't seem to really factor that information in, I dislike some of the directions the ITU & Huawei seem to go for there, BUT, even so, this presentation basically exactly answers most of your questions (I think the other commenters already did a most excellent job answering what the presentation doesn't), even generalizing them to seemingly "far out"—yet apparently entirely feasible—ideas like 'Holographic Teleports' (think VR on steroids.)

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

#42

Post by miki123211 »

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 remember good old Skype from like 3, 4 years ago that didn't use to suck at this so much, at least on the audio side. When the network connection was really bad, it used something like phone quality, when it was good, the quality was closer to Face Time. You could hear the quality shift dynamically when network conditions were changing (i.e. someone starting a download). I really enjoyed talking on Skype back then, I knew I could depend on it and get the best I could, whatever the conditions were. Now it's much worse, the quality is average, it doesn't handle bad connections well and it doesn't fully utilize the good ones. I don't think we have anything as good now as we had back then. There's Team Talk which is amazing for audio, but much more cumbersome to set up.

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

#43

Post by r3bl »

chvid wrote: post #23
r3bl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's a chicken and egg problem. I know I would rely on video way more if my first sentence in every video call didn't have to be "can you hear me?"

The eggs have been there for a long time and plenty of chickens has been hatched; but noone is eating them. I am pretty sure that I can do a high quality FaceTime call with a number of people. Yet still I prefer doing a regular phone call. As so does just about everyone else. The question you should ask is: Why is that? It is not a technical problem.

> I am pretty sure that I can do a high quality FaceTime call with a number of people.

A number of people that could afford $1000+ to be able to use that platform.

I personally wouldn't consider this problem to be technically-solved until an Android that can barely be considered as a mid-ranger can do it.

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

#44

Post by rlyshw »

rixed wrote: post #40
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…

Since you seems to be very familiar with that topic, do you know if most popular video chat applications stream voice and video directly between peer, or do they have to go through some central server? And if so, how much latency does that cost us?

WebRTC is direct peer to peer. There’s a reliance on a STUN/TURN server to provide signaling for things like NAT traversal but other than that it’s all p2p.

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

#46

Post by tehlike »

rlyshw wrote: post #44
rixed wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you seems to be very familiar with that topic, do you know if most popular video chat applications stream voice and video directly between peer, or do they have to go through some central server? And if so, how much latency does that cost us?

WebRTC is direct peer to peer. There’s a reliance on a STUN/TURN server to provide signaling for things like NAT traversal but other than that it’s all p2p.

The answer might be a mix, if video conference involves more than trivial amount of participants.

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

#47

Post by syllogism »

amelius wrote: post #30

Related question: why does Netflix provide a so much better video streaming service than a short-distance VoIP session? (I say short-distance because Netflix obviously uses a content distribution network of some kind; not taking this into account would make the comparison unfair).

I heard that Netflix collocate in many ISP's data centers.

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

#48

Post by dqybh »

r3bl wrote: post #43
chvid wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The eggs have been there for a long time and plenty of chickens has been hatched; but noone is eating them. I am pretty sure that I can do a high quality FaceTime call with a number of people. Yet still I prefer doing a regular phone call. As so does just about everyone else. The question you should ask is: Why is that? It is not a technical problem.

> I am pretty sure that I can do a high quality FaceTime call with a number of people. A number of people that could afford $1000+ to be able to use that platform. I personally wouldn't consider this problem to be technically-solved until an Android that can barely be considered as a mid-ranger can do it.

I wouldn't expect a mid-ranger phone to be fast and completely reliable. That's why it's just a mid-ranger. The price is a compromise; you get shitty radio hardware and shitty software so you get shitty videoconferencing.

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

#49

Post by sansnomme »

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…

Any relation between Salsify and the Puffer project?

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

#50

Post by MarkMc »

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.

Or maybe just clever software trained to filter the video feed so the person's gaze is shifted up.
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