Disconnects when streaming video

Hello, we are using Photon to stream a 4K video from an Oculus Go to an Android Phone, the image itself is a heavily compressed Texture2D JPG.

So this used to work fine until this month where our customer has reported frequent disconnects, and our application has become rather unusable because of this.

I am now wondering if we are streaming too much data, and why it would only be a problem until recently. We would be happy to get a paid account if this helps.

I've also been looking into photon bolt, and this example of streaming bytes is exactly what we are doing:
https://doc.photonengine.com/en-us/bolt/current/in-depth/streaming-bytes

Only we are using PUN, but it seemed to work fine up until now.
The tutorial link above also states "Be careful with how much data you stream, as there is a limit to how much you can."
So is there any indication on how much data we can stream?

Would it be a lot of work to switch from PUN to Bolt?

Comments

  • edit - okay I looked around and realize this might actually be because of the 3GB data limit per CCU, so we would have to get the $95 a month subscription. But what is the cost when you go over the limit?
  • We did not cap your traffic, so your issues are not related to that.
    Traffic pricing is shown on https://www.photonengine.com/en-US/PUN/pricing

    3 GB are included per each plan CCU
    additional traffic cost per overage GB:
    $ 0.05 Europe / Canada, East / Russia / Russia, East / USA, East / USA, West
    $ 0.10 Asia / Australia / Chinese Mainland / India / Japan / South America / South Korea

    So you should thoroughly calculate, what and how much you are sending. Also check your counters in the dashboard.

    Video streaming is not a typical use case for Photon.
  • frecreate
    frecreate
    edited June 2019
    Markus said:

    Video streaming is not a typical use case for Photon.

    Okay so would you recommend Photon Bolt or did you mean in general? It is not completely clear to me what the difference/advantage of bolt would be in this case. Also the pricing of bolt is the same?

  • We had no bigger changes on the server-side of the Photon Cloud, so it sounds like something on the client side changed. Did you switch to a different Unity version? Other changes?

    You should try to identify if the problem is a network problem. Sending a lot of data can affect a wifi router negatively and this will in turn cause artefacts and such.

    While Video is not a typical usecase just yet, we are experimenting with it, too, using the Realtime API (part of PUN) to sync the video.

    Bolt has the option to connect clients directly, which could have benefits for 2 user sessions. However, as one client is the host, streaming video to more users will not be feasible. So it's not a scalable solution.
  • I changed a few things before release but no major or version changes, just small fixed before release. I haven't touched the streaming part in a while now either. I did recently improve something that would potentially send a lot of RPC calls back and forth, let's say you have 20 projects, then it would have called 20 RPC's on the master and client, so 40 wouldn't seem that much to me but I changed this on both sides to just a single function just in case. But I haven't made a new build yet.

    I undestand our client is mostly using a 4g hotspot via their phone, as they sometimes also have to visit places where they have a lot of network policy, such as a hospital. Or sometimes the locations network is just too slow.

    Didn't you have some analytics and logging going on? Or do I need the specific device itself and look at the logs there?

    I have the opportunity now to experiment streaming with bolt on another project, so I will also try that out and see if it works better.