[Live-devel] Streaming H264: quality issue

[Christophe Lemoine]

Hi,

I'm trying to stream H264 video but I have some quality issues and I 
cannot find a way to solve it. Maybe some experienced developers can 
help me on that....
I generate a TS file containing H264 video and ac3 audi using ffmpeg:
ffmpeg -i video.mkv  -vbsf h264_mp4toannexb -ab 384k   -vcodec copy 
-acodec ac3 video.ts

Result:
Input #0, mpegts, from 'video.ts':
   Duration: 00:01:59.99, start: 1.400000, bitrate: 9680 kb/s
   Program 1 Service01
     Metadata:
       name            : Service01
       provider_name   : FFmpeg
     Stream #0.0[0x100]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1920x800, 23.98 fps, 30k 
tbr, 90k tbn, 47.95 tbc
     Stream #0.1[0x101](fin): Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 384 kb/s


I then stream video.ts using live555, and play it using vlc. Although I 
do get something on VLC, the quality is very bad (I get good quality 
with MPEG2 videos). CPU on the server remains normal (almost idle), CPU 
usage on the client is quite high, but, if I play the video.ts file 
directly in VLC (no streaming), I get good quality, so I guess that my 
client can decode the video without any issue.

Maybe using a TS container is not very optimal for streaming H264 ? I 
noticed that live555 also support m4e files, but could not find a way to 
generate such a file.

Here are the quality results from openRTSP:

begin_QOS_statistics
subsession    video/MP2T
num_packets_received    109834
num_packets_lost    194
elapsed_measurement_time    120.000112
kBytes_received_total    144541.544000
measurement_sampling_interval_ms    1000
kbits_per_second_min    315.835894
kbits_per_second_ave    9636.093940
kbits_per_second_max    29382.884045
packet_loss_percentage_min    0.000000
packet_loss_percentage_ave    0.176319
packet_loss_percentage_max    6.666667
inter_packet_gap_ms_min    0.013000
inter_packet_gap_ms_ave    1.091214
inter_packet_gap_ms_max    118.313000
end_QOS_statistics




Thanks for your help
Christophe