[Live-devel] Using RTCP to detect packet loss

[Mathijs Vos | Thimeo Audio Technology BV]

Hi,

I’ve recently started to use live555 for a small streaming project. Most of it is working now, but it’s not entirely clear to me how to deal with RTCP. I’ve studied the test programs that come with live555 but none of them seem to do what I want: to detect packet loss on both sides (both streamer and receiver).

On the streaming-side I can access the RTPTransmissionStatsDB, but totNumPacketsLost() only reports “16777215”. I’m checking it periodically, but actually I’d like to check it as soon as an RR packet arrives, to detect packet loss as soon as possible.
On the receiving side I’m not sure on how to access these statistics. Furthermore, I can imagine the client knows about packet loss soon enough (the sequence number will differ from the expected number), but I’d like the server to know about this as soon as possible as well. How can I achieve this? Is it possible to force sending an RR packet back to the server? Would it be a good idea to do this that way at all?

Thanks,

Mathijs