[Galene] Re: Talk about Galène today (monday) at 17pm CET

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

>> Once that is fixed, Galène will accurately estimate the bottleneck
>> throughput, and we can default « Send » to « unlimited ».  Right now,
>> setting « Send » to « unlimited » may cause lag unless the bottleneck
>> router is well implemented.

> In my experience setting send quality even just to "low" or "normal"
> results in pumping data traffic (up and down) even in a conference with
> just two users.

Yes, that's the symptom if you're oversubscribed and bufferbloated.
Galène pumps packets into the network, which buffers them, then suddently
starts dropping a whole burst of packets, which causes Galène to back off.
Then the cycle starts again.

In an ideal world, the router would start by dropping a tiny fraction of
packets, so that Galène can back off smoothly.  In the absence of
progressive dropping, Galène needs to react before the first packet drop
by monitoring the second derivative of packet delay — that's the bit
that's not implemented yet.

> Would it make sense to stop sending a video stream to a user if the user
> displays only one of the streams as full-screen?

The plan is to send a low-resolution, low-framerate version, so that when
the user unzooms they get a low-resolution image straight away rather than
a blank frame (while the client renegotiates).  That's the simulcast bit
near the end.  It should be possible to get a usable image at 50kbps,
perhaps even less.

We'll see how well it works.

> Hmm, to me [Panic] and [Mute] sometime feel redundant.

No, they're not redundant.  I use mute quite often — during a departmental
meeting, I'm muted most of the time, except when I am invited to speak by
the head of department.  So mute is a quick audio on/off switch.  The
Panic button is used less often, but it needs to be there in case
something goes horribly wrong.

I'm not going to change the logic, I like it.  But I am looking for
a better label.

>>> Especially since the [Logout] link is too hard to find.

>> In normal usage, you just close the browser tab, no?

> Ah, it seems my users and me are probably too disciplined. ;-)

Heh.

-- Juliusz