[Bloat] Bufferbloat glossary
Kenneth Porter
shiva at sewingwitch.com
Sun Mar 29 17:08:38 EDT 2020
--On Sunday, March 29, 2020 10:23 PM +0300 Jonathan Morton
<chromatix99 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the main distinction between online gaming and teleconferencing
> is the volume of data involved. Games demand low latency, but also
> usually aren't throwing megabytes of data across the network at a time,
> just little bundles of game state updates telling the server what actions
> the player is taking, and telling the player's computer what enemies and
> other effects the player needs to be able to see. Teleconferencing, by
> contrast, tends to involve multiple audio and video streams going
> everywhere.
But most gamers DO use voice chat systems to coordinate their play with
teammates. This might be built into the game or it might be a second
program such as Mumble, Ventrilo, or TeamSpeak. Two-way headsets were
popular with gamers long before one saw them used for office conferencing.
And gamers care much more about latency than some office flunky who hears
something a second or two later than transmitted. So their codecs tend to
be a lot more network-friendly, trading off quality for low latency.
(Given the high bandwidth needs of video, I wonder if anyone's working on
avatar-based meeting systems wherein one creates an avatar from one's photo
(like Bitmoji) and uses pre-downloaded content (like video games) to
construct low-bandwidth video streams?)
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