Questions on Video Streaming to iOS and Android Devices Profiling

[ruian.xu]

Hi, guys:

I'm an embedded software engineer starting to work on starting to work with Linux streaming solutions. And got no experience with network and smartphone OSes.

When we stream video to PC(receiving via VLC) on PC side, we found there's a latency of 1.2 seconds for H.264. It includes

sensor grabs data
data is sent over the network
VLC buffers and plays


We found out after a while, that there's buffering control on VLC. For H.264 streaming, however, the minimum we can set is 400 -- 500 ms. However, on Android phones, we were NOT able to find some software that has very short(minimum) delays/buffering.

Can anyone suggest

How is latency generally measured/profiled for video streaming to smart phones?
Do you have any network sniffing software on Android/iOS to recommend?
I saw in Apple's documentation that HTTP live streaming recommends 10s "file size". Anyway to overcome this? (Is jailbreaking required for installing sniffing tool on iOS?)


Thanks in advance!

[kieranrk]

As a general rule, unless you build the streaming and playback system end-to-end yourself you cannot control the latency because it's hardbaked by the manufacturer and any standard that is used for controlling latency (e.g. VBV) is just ignored.

[dukey]

Does the video start with an I frame ? If not it probably has to wait for one to arrive.