CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#video-streamingreal-time
Eric Marchetti Santos
Eric Marchetti Santos

Reputation: 117

Effectively sending/streaming real-time video

I am developing a game where I want to stream the camera’s output from a server (which renders everything) to several clients. For simplicity, I am ignoring all audio data.

Currently, I record the camera’s render as a bitmap with a 400x300 resolution, and then I convert it to JPEG, add a time stamp and send it to the client over UDP.

With given resolution, my payload size varies from 13KB to 20KB. How can I make it more effective?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 750

Answers (2)

Brad
Brad

Reputation: 163593

Use a video codec, not an image codec.

JPEG is appropriate for single images. (There is MJPEG, which is effectively a hack on this... but it's not all that great of quality.)

Most devices have a hardware codec for something like H.264 that you can use. If not, you can use H.264 in software, or use a free and open codec like VP8 or VP9... just be aware that those take more CPU for encoding. (Not that it will matter much at such a low resolution.)

Upvotes: 1

Koby Douek
Koby Douek

Reputation: 16693

Considering you want to keep the image dimensions, there are 2 things I can think of which can reduce the payload:

Here's a calculation I just made:

400 x 300 JPEG with 10/10 quality = 29.6KB.

400 x 300 JPEG with 8/10 quality = 19.6KB.

400 x 300 JPEG with 5/10 quality = 8.7KB.

400 x 300 JPEG with 2/10 quality = 5.6KB.

So, as you can see, losing 0.2 quality results in losing 1/3 of the image weight, which is significant.

  • Framerate - Most cameras today can support up to 200 FPS, which is totally unnecessary for smooth videos. You can use 20 FPS and still get a good quality video. Reducing the FPS will linearly reduce the payload.

Upvotes: 0

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