While in a group Video call mobile getting hot

mediasoup-demo
1

Hello,

I’m not sure if my observations are attributed to MediaSoup. Yet, thought of sharing to get inputs and suggestions.

I have deployed latest MediaSoup v3 demo in AWS EC2 instance. I’m able to make small group video calls. The config changes are:

  • Medium Quality, Simulcast is Off, Default codec is H.264 Base Profile

The problem I have observed is, while in a group video call (say 4 people) and joined over mobile browser, after approx 10+ minutes Mobile is getting hot.
This is observed in both iPhone 6s (Safari) and Android (Chrome) mobiles whereas iPhone 6s is quick to get hot. Newer iPhone models also found this buts takes more time.

I appreciate any of your inputs, comments & suggestions. Thank you.

Note: I have not observed this heating issue while I was testing with v2 & h.264 codec few months ago

2

How is this an issue related to mediasoup or mediasoup-demo? Some devices are not good to render many videos, specially if they are high resolution videos. Assume that the mediasoup-demo app is not optimized for mobile devices. It’s just a demo.

3

I agree and understand that the issue is not with MediaSoup & I’m using a demo. I have started with a note saying the same.

Be it demo code or my own, the implementation looks similar to start with.

I would like to understand if there is any area to optimise in the Client/demo code

  • If it is related to encode/decode of video in browser, we can’t do much

For an end user experience point of view, Other video conf Apps do not heat the phone as much.

4

As refered before this has to do with video encoding/decoding. Take a look at your getUserMedia calls for resolution tweaking and scaleResolutionDownBy usage in svc.

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5

You should not compare other video conf apps with the mediasoup-demo. The demo is not just some UI on top of mediasoup.

In mobile you would not want to receive high simulcast streams, for instance. Use the mediasoup API to not send them to mobile devices.

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6

I don’t know if this might help you. And its not an objective given I don’t have any emperical evidence to prove.

But I did try the mediasoup demo app as is default for teaching some kids online. The thing I noticed is that it was heating my mobile up. I use an iPhone 6 no S. it was heating.

I decided to write my own UI on top without any extra libraries just raw video and audio elements and minimal colors. And now its working great. The student’s ui is simple it only has a full screen button along with mic mute/unmute and a video div playing the screen I share to teach. And it works good, no heating…

But again, that was just my experience.

7

When you say simulcast is off. do you mean you’re passing simulcast=false explicitly. I was stuck on this for a decade. Because unless you do that it will use a simulcast for sending 3 streams as the default condition is:

so unless you pass simulcast=false in the url simulcast is on. Also when we are using mobile phones unless you want full hd content a low res video works just incredible. I tried 640x480 by passing

{
   video: { height: { ideal: 640 }, width: { ideal: 480 } }
}

plus simulcast=false works great.

8

Yes, but I cannot help if you just want to check the mediasoup-demo app instead of reading the mediasoup API documentation.

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