Troubleshooting

Owned by Brook Warner
Last updated: Apr 21, 2024 by Brook Warner
3 min read

Network Connectivity Troubleshooting

Uh oh, are you having network connectivity issues? Perhaps the connection is slow or dropping. Here are our troubleshooting questions to get you started.

 

Are you on a VPN?

Few VPNs are set up to meet the needs of low latency streaming video. Broadly, there are two different things that matter:

  1. Bandwidth. We require 500 kilobits per second (Kb/s) or so as a minimum, but need 3 megabits per second (Mb/s) for a perfect experience.

  2. Latency. We want < 50 milliseconds (ms), ideally.

 

What kind of speed, latency, jitter, and packet loss are you seeing?

Things like jitter and packet loss also affect the quality of the experience.  

 

Are the issues consistent across browsers and devices? 

We support the latest versions of the following browsers*:

  • Desktop PC: Chrome (mac and windows), Firefox (mac and windows), Opera, Microsoft Edge Chromium (but not the older Microsoft Edge), Safari on Mac

  • Android: Chrome, Firefox

  • iOS/iPadOS: Safari

*Other browsers that support webRTC may work, however, these are the ones we actively QA test on. 

 

Which browser and browser version are you using? 

You could try using another browser as if there's some issue with a GPU video decoder the alternate browser may well use a different path. Depending on the browser it may be possible to disable/enable hardware-accelerated video encoding which may also make a difference.

Are you experiencing the issues in specific situations like zoom sharing?

Using zoom or google meet will slow down the experience and cause delays, however, the video feed should reinstate itself automatically when the cause of the initial jitter/loss is remedied. With the exception of a pretty significant drop in network quality, we wouldn't expect the video stream to completely shut down and never return.

 

What does the internet connectivity status indicate?

The default UI in DDNA Studio includes an internet connectivity status. If you are using a custom UI, you could build this status in yourself or even weave it into the conversation to ask users to turn off their video if their connection is poor. However, the standard webRTC we use automatically gives preference to voice over video when the internet connection is poor so the animation should reduce as it focuses on voice. It supports down to 2 megabits per second. 

 

Are you by chance resizing the browser window? Or changing from full-screen window to partial window?

Doing some testing here may help if the video feed is going dark unexpectedly.

Do you have any internal network restrictions? 

Sometimes internal network restrictions might affect the stream/video.

 

Okay, so you’ve checked everything above out and still are stumped? 

 

Let’s do a few quick things:

  1. Redeploy your project in DDNA Studio to make sure you have the latest DDNAS updates.

  2. On the chance that your issues aren't network related you could try disabling hardware accelerated video decode in Chrome. To do this, in chrome://flags and search for  "Hardware-accelerated video decode" and set it to "Disabled".

  3. If you are feeling technical, check out the webrtc stats in Chrome (chrome://webrtc-internals/), which covers a broad arrange of topics but may give insight into the network conditions.

 

Still no luck? 

 

Create a help ticket and our network team will get back to you as soon as possible. Let us know what you are seeing and we will review our server logs and help diagnose the issue. 

Here’s the information we need to help:

  1. DDNA Studio project name and the deployed URL link

  2. Session IDs, timestamps, and timezone 

 

Soul Machines Support link: https://support.soulmachines.cloud/

You can also directly in the lower right-hand corner of Digital DNA Studio click the? icon and then go to "Help & Support".