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Opentok SDK making Android and iOS devices too hot

I am using Opentok SDK for video calling in IOS and Android devices with Nodejs server.

It is a group call scenario with max 4 people, when we stream for more than 10 min, both the devices getting too hot.

Does anyone have solution for this? We can't degrade the video quality.

Solution

  • This is likely because you are using the default video code, VP8, which is not hardware accelerated. You can change the codec per publisher to either H.264 or VP8, but there are some trade-offs to this approach.

    Their lack of H.264 SVC support is disappointing, but might be okay depending on your use case. If you read this whole post and still want more guidance, I'd recommend reaching out to their developer support team, and/or post more about your use case here.

    Here's some more context from the OpenTok Documentation, but I recommend you read the whole page to understand where you need to make compromises:

    The VP8 real-time video codec is a software codec. It can work well at lower bitrates and is a mature video codec in the context of WebRTC. As a software codec it can be instantiated as many times as is needed by the application within the limits of memory and CPU. The VP8 codec supports the OpenTok Scalable Video feature, which means it works well in large sessions with supported browsers and devices.

    The H.264 real-time video codec is available in both hardware and software forms depending on the device. It is a relatively new codec in the context of WebRTC although it has a long history for streaming movies and video clips over the internet. Hardware codec support means that the core CPU of the device doesn’t have to work as hard to process the video, resulting in reduced CPU load. The number of hardware instances is device-dependent with iOS having the best support. Given that H.264 is a new codec for WebRTC and each device may have a different implementation, the quality can vary. As such, H.264 may not perform as well at lower bit-rates when compared to VP8. H.264 is not well suited to large sessions since it does not support the OpenTok Scalable Video feature.