Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "The Video Conferencing Problem - Computerphile" video.

  1. 20:23 This is where “quality of service” (“QoS”) comes into play. TCP/IP allows for marking packets with indications as to whether timeliness of delivery is more important than reliability of delivery: that is, if a packet is taking too long to be delivered, it might as well be dropped rather than delivered too late to be of use.
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  2. 9:53 Some people think that stuttering might be caused by a neural analogue to this sort of phenomenon.
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  3. 0:28 I see some interesting books on GCHQ and the like. No copy of Spycatcher ? Is that still banned in the UK?
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  4. 8:05 Interestingly, the speed of sound in Earth’s atmosphere at room temperature is almost exactly one millionth of the speed of light.
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  5. 17:09 Which brings us to the phenomenon known as “buffer bloat”, where all kinds of devices between your end of the connection and mine have large buffers built into them, just to make some problems easier to solve. But of course this adds latency for real-time applications. So there are people trying to persuade makers of these devices to reduce their buffer sizes. Which requires them to write better code to deal with the problems that they were papering over with large buffers before.
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  6. On the other hand, why is it that “professional” news networks have such long latency in live connections with reporters in the field, particularly across countries? The anchor says something, the correspondent nods silently for a two or three seconds, then they start speaking. That’s not common with videoconferencing, is it?
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  7. Aren’t there double-microphone designs, where the forward one directly picks up the speaker’s voice, while the one behind picks up the room reverb so it can be subtracted out? I recall Apple had something like this in its “PlainTalk” microphones from the early/mid 1990s. What has happened since then?
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  8. Asterisk is fun. I set it up for a client quite a few years ago, and even did some custom programming for it. That was an audio-only application, to replace analog phone calls.
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  9. Spoken like a true telephone engineer. A retired one.
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  10. What happens when your audio/video is being received by more than one other conference participant? Does multicasting work in practice, so a single copy of the data is transmitted from your machine, and received by multiple recipients? Or do you have to send out multiple copies, one to each recipient?
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  11. So how is it we Internet users can afford to interconnect using lower-latency landlines, and the news networks cannot?
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  12. 2 bytes per sample × 2 channels × 44100 Hz sampling rate = 176.4 KB/s = 1411.2 Kb/s
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  13. Why always with the Australia digs? Not sure why I care ... I’m in NZ ...
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