Video Quality Enhancement Tricks Using Asterisk Technology

There has been enough talk about new webRTC work handled using Asterisk. After the appearance of Asterisk 16, it has become crucial for every business owner to consider the impact of this work against the poor performance of the network that further affects the video experience.

People have been using video for communication purposes. Individuals across the entire world converse with their loved ones over video calls. On the other hand, business organizations use it to organize meetings. The latter gained more popularity than it ever did in the past, primarily due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Video calling systems are available on smartphones, as well as desktop or laptop browsers.

Video calling systems, however, come at a cost. For instance, it can put immense pressure on the CPU. It doesn’t tolerate the ineptness of networks, either. You may argue that your network is good enough, but you can’t be further from the truth. Every network will encounter problems at some point in time, which will prove devastating to video.

One of the most common symptoms is freezing. If the video call freezes, then the person you were talking to will stop moving all of a sudden. While it will recover after some time, the situation isn’t something that you would like to encounter.

An asterisk development services company uses different technological interventions to prevent such instances and improve the user experience. It’s worth mentioning here that these technologies are available in Asterisk only. It means that you have to rely on tech companies that specialize in Asterisk development.

(1) PLI and FIR:

You must be wondering what these two terms mean. Well, PLI stands for Picture Loss Indication, and FIR is the abbreviated version of Full Intra Request. A video decoder decodes a video stream. When it does, it depends on the previous packets to decode the current one. In such situations, a problem pops up where the system loses a packet. Some codecs can’t recover it at all. As a result, it will come to a standstill almost instantly. It’s what causes the picture to freeze. If you wish to avoid it, then you should look for a provider of the asterisk IVR solution to offer mechanisms called PLI and FIR. These will allow the client to place a request for a full-frame. This full-frame restarts the decoding process, and the picture will start moving again as it should.

(2) REMB:

Here’s another abbreviated term called REMB that stands for Receiver Estimated Maximum Bitrate. Losing packets or putting up with out-of-order packets affects the video experience negatively. However, most people consider only these two things and forget about the bandwidth. How many organizations in this world have 1Gbps internet connections? REMB happens to be one of the most primitive ways in webRTC that can help you deal with these issues. It lets a receiver prepare a report based on an estimation of the amount of bandwidth available between the sender and the receiver. In turn, the sender can alter the encoding bitrate to make sure that it can fit between the available bandwidth. Now, there are two ways an asterisk IVR solution provider can achieve it. If you wish to know more, then you may contact an Asterisk development agency.

(3) NACK:

The final abbreviated term you must learn about is NACK which stands for Negative Acknowledgement. The PLI or FIR mechanisms explained earlier are a last resort. When you can’t do anything else, you have to resort to those two to ensure that the video keeps playing. However, before you incorporate those measures, you should try this one. NACK allows a receiver to put up a false impression that it never got a packet from the sender. Naturally, the sender has no other option but to resend the packet. In doing so, the bandwidth consumption decreases significantly. You will also get the packet in a full-frame. Furthermore, this feature lets a receiver to place a request for several packets instead of just one. Asterisk developers implement it using an RTP packet queue on egress and ingress video traffic.

• • Retransmission using egress – A specific egress queue allows Asterisk to admit requests from several receivers for packet retransmission. It stores a particular number of RTP packets depending on the sequence number and resends them based on the requests it received. It’s a queue that adds new packers and removes the old ones continuously. As a result, the video flow remains normal.

• • Reordering the ingress – An asterisk development services company places a queue on the reception of the RTP video traffic to ensure proper, sequential organization of the packets based on their number. They do it long before the video traffic reaches the Asterisk core. It’s an exceptionally beneficial feature possessed by Asterisk-based applications as they don’t have to keep tabs on the out-of-order packets.

• Loss detection in ingress – The queue even allows developers to pinpoint the gaps sequentially as soon as they arrive. They handle the scenario by requesting retransmission of packets after placing a specific number of them in the queue. Developers prioritize only the out-of-order packets and not the ones that lose their way. As soon as they achieve a high watermark inside the queue, Asterisk puts in a request for retransmission. Upon receiving the re-transmitted packets, Asterisk decommissions the queue to the best of its capabilities until it spots a missing packet. If it doesn’t receive any re-transmitted packets, it gets rid of the queue once it reaches its limits and restarts the process.

To conclude
If you combine all these technologies, you will make sure that your video flow remains undisturbed, even in the most extreme conditions. These systems will remain in the background but will continue to deliver a stellar user experience.