Thursday, January 28, 2010

Trigger Sports Live!

You can watch yesterday's interview here.

We discuss a video about open carry that starts at around 16:50. My segment starts around 22:30.

I'm trying to figure out why the camera is so jerky. Last week I had it set at 30 fps and it worked OK but every once in a while would freeze, like too much data was streaming in and clogging the pipeline. This week I scaled it back to 25 fps and it looked fine on my end, but in playback looks jerky, more like 5 fps. My Internet connection is high speed cable, but the lights on the modem were flashing a bit yesterday, so there could have been connectivity issues--we are having some weather here. Then again, it could have been with Skype, or on ASTN's end...

Ah well, I never claimed to be Dr. Zarkov...but I'll keep working on it. Any ideas on what I could try from those of you who work with technology more advanced than my old pull-start model will be welcome...please use very small words and try to talk like Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan if you don't want my eyes to glaze over.

3 comments:

jon said...

when streaming video unreliably, lost frames will "bleed" the feed into itself, appearing to pixelate, which is hard on the eyes. this is because each frame is just a mask added to the previous one, using one or another clever encoding scheme, so that only the pixels that need to change, actually do.

but just in case, there are "keyframes" in video streams to catch up the draw area with where it ought to be at that point in time, redrawing every single pixel with a full fresh frame. connection hiccups can be detected, and so streaming software can just stall and wait for a keyframe.

if they're frequent enough, and the hiccups are infrequent enough, you'll never notice. it's subjective, because the various consumers of the stream have different routes to the host server.

recording equipment that stalls is no good at any framerate. nobody can watch that. but, upstream bandwidth is usually a tiny fraction of downstream, so even having "high-speed cable" doth not a good server make, sadly.

also, the human eye does not like less than 28fps, no matter what. unplug the ethernet cable to the feral sons' rooms and send them out unto the place with the big yellow thing in the sky.

Anonymous said...

* in addition to the above, you might jimmy with any "buffer" settings you have in the recording program (turn them up).

* trade resolution for framerate, if possible

* switch to fiber-to-the-premise, if available

TJP said...

Your connection speed is a typical throughput rate provided for marketing purposes. In reality, it is subject to congestion, error correction, or simply lost packets. You're also using a cable service, and those tend to be laid out in a bus topology, where your neighborhood users, who are on the same network segment, can make your bandwidth drop if they're busy doing Internet stuff.

Are you sharing your cable modem through a wireless access point--specifically the machine you're using being connected through wireless? This adds latency, too.