The tale of a Skype Video Call

I have been doing a few skype video calls recently. I do not know how, but on the last one a debug window popped up. So here are some stats from the call. Mostly the video holds together, though occasionally the packet loss becomes too great and we have to restart the video. It is good this can be redone without reconnecting the call. This happens more often in my transmit direction. A round trip is enormous! the round trip should be around 9 ms not the 190 ms to 204 ms in these measurements. I deliberately included a high loss and low loss period. The high loss periods do not seem to occur so often, maybe every 5 to 10 minutes, but there is occasionally a no loss period. 76.7% is a lot of packet loss. Interestingly I am sending video at a rate of 438 kbit/s but only receiving it at 192 kbit/s. Jitter is moderately high at 44 to 121 ms. This is above the minimum you would expect on an IP network with it’s poor jitter control, but not as bad as the 3000 ms that some video codecs allow for.

All in all I’d say that the video is acceptable and useable. Once we have more bandwidth it should be better.