Flash + RTMFP + Stratus: Video Quality on Linux

Question

I'm developing a video chat-like application using Flash RTMFP and Stratus. So far, I'm having good success. I can build from source, tweak settings, and get video and audio in both directions.

There's one glaring problem I haven't been able to solve, however -- when using a client on a Linux machine, the video received by the other end looks very poor. It's blocky and pixellated, almost as if it's rendering 160x120 in a much larger frame. When sending from a Mac (my other dev machine), the video looks quite good.

I've tried modifying all the settings I can think of -- frame rate, "quality", size, audio settings -- with no discernible improvement. I've tried running it as a local file and from a remote server. The network where I'm working is extremely fast, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Is there anything else I can try? Any suggestions or ideas are greatly appreciated.

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Bad camera or bad camera driver?

Stratus does not change video encoding, it simply is another variation of the RTMFP protocol for transferring exactly the same compressed stream.

One way you can check whether Stratus indeed plays any role in this is to try to stream the same stuff through Adobe Flash Media Server, the development version is free from adobe.com.

I have done Stratus applications, and have not experienced any degradation of video quality compared to Flash Media Server solution. In fact when the camera quality is set to 100, you won't notice the difference between raw camera video and compressed stream when using loopback mode. Apart from possibly limited framerate, if you specify bandwidth (the three are intimately related - bandwidth, framerate, quality, as per documentation of Camera.setQuality or Camera.setMode)