Audio issues

Hello all,

Today I did my first session using foundry. I had many issues with the audio. I installed and activated the module JitsiWebRTC because I have a pretty bad internet connection (also the reason I use forge-vtt). My players logged in with audio and video activated. The sound quality was very choppy and the video froze from time to time but I could hear everyone.
To have clear audio I changed to audio only. After the session reloaded and the players reconnected I could only hear 1 player and not the others. I restarted the world but the same issue persisted. So I deactivated the jitsi module and after the session restart the audio seemed to work fine but after a while from time to time players lost audio, while chat and other things still worked they had to refresh the page to get audio working again.

I’m new to foundry and have no idea where to look for the source of the issues, my players are also 12/13 years old so diagnosing on their end is almost impossible without getting their parents involved.
I also don’t want to use another service like discord just because my players are kids and want to keep it as simple as possible.

thanks in advance for any advice/work-arounds/…
cheers

Hi,

The audio/video would require a certain amount of bandwidth and processing power, so if you have a bad internet connection, switching to audio only was probably the best choice.
I don’t know exactly about the audio issue with jitsi, I’ve generally heard that it’s stable, so it may have been a fluke, or it might have been related to the bad internet connections you had, which would be disruptive for this kind of thing, though it’s supposed to be able to recover from those kinds of connectivity issues.

There’s unfortunately not much I can help with. I’ve well versed in that (I wrote the native audio/video feature in Foundry) and I also have no idea where to look for the source of the issues. All I can say is that audio/video is a peer to peer system that works as a mesh, so it wouldn’t go through the servers, so if an issue happened, it’s more like due to a connection issue between you and the other people in your group. Note that it’s a mesh network, so you would be connected individually to each of your 5 players (assuming it was 5) and uploading your audio to each of the 5 players separately, and downloading from audio from them individually as well.
Jitsi will generally work better for people with a lower internet speed, while sacrificing latency, as it would all go through the Jitsi server, which would mean you have a single connection and would send once and receive once, thus decreasing the bandwidth and CPU resources needed.

For more information about all that, maybe you will find this post informative :

I hope that helps

Ok thanks, I’ll go with “it’s been a fluke”. I have read that post you linked before the session and that’s why I wanted to try jitsi first. I’ll try jitsi, audio only, again next session.

I do play mmorpgs with mumble for comms with sometimes 20+ users which works fine (I assume mumble works in a same was as jitsi) so just audio shouldn’t be an issue. (3.2Mbps down, 0.8Mbps up)

cheers

Mumble works differently, same as with Discord, in that you will usually have only one person talking at a time (i.e: sending/receiving) whereas the webrtc standard (used by the audio/video conferencing) requires everyone to constantly send data. It’s true though that if there is silence, then the data being sent is very small, but the connection remains open and ‘sending’… if you stop receiving something, then it thinks it lost connection, and will try to reconnect. Instead, mumble and discord work differently, because they have a central server which takes on the task of actually filtering out the silent data and mixing everyone’s audio into a single stream (some of these statements are actually assumptions on my part).
I agree with you though that with your connection speed, and past experience, just audio shouldn’t be an issue. I thought when you said bad internet connection, that it was more of the “lives in rural area, might lose internet if a particular cloud is overhead, or the wind blows too hard on the satellite dish”, which is what I often see with people having issues like the ones you mentioned.

Good luck and let us know if you’ve had better results the next time.