[Live-devel] What are the consequences of increasing RTCP.cpp::maxRTCPPacketSize?

[Ross Finlayson]

> I can fix the famous "RTCPInstance error: Hit limit when reading incoming packet over TCP. Increase "maxRTCPPacketSize"" error by setting maxRTCPPacketSize to INT16_MAX * 8.
> I am not able to upgrade any camera firmware code and I'm running the latest 01 April 16 LiveMedia code on my PC.
> The default value for maxRTCPPacketSize is 1456, what are the consequences of increasing this value besides more memory consumption?

This error message is caused by a buggy server (in this case, your IP camera) not implementing RTP/RTCP-over-TCP correctly.  It’s possibly (but not certain) that it is running an old version of the “LIVE555 Streaming Media” code that had such a bug.

What brand of camera is this?  You say that you can’t upgrade its firmware, but if it’s running our code, then the manufacturer is required - under the conditions of the LGPL - to upgrade its firmware, upon request, to use the latest version of the LIVE555 code, or else provide you a way to do this upgrade yourself.  But if no firmware upgrade is available, then I suggest replacing the camera, or else not streaming RTP/RTCP-over-TCP, because this error is most likely to occur if your stream is approaching the capacity of your network, in which case streaming over TCP is a bad idea in any case.

As you noted, you can probably ‘paper over’ this bug by increasing “maxRTCPPacketSize”, but that doesn’t solve the problem, and will probably cause some RTP video data to get lost.


Ross Finlayson
Live Networks, Inc.
http://www.live555.com/