
AVChat 2 and AVConference are compatible with both FMS 2 & 3 and Red5 .
Setting up connection types and the video-audio quality in AVChat 1.3
Prerequisites:
- working AVChat installation
- access to bandwidth.xml
About the bandwidth.xml file
The file contains information about the connection types available to the AVChat user. The xml file is a basic XML, UTF-8 encoded, file. To edit it you can use Notepad or any other text editor.
The XML structure is made out of a global container: <bandwidth>, which in turn contains several <item> nodes. Each of these nodes can be considered a connection type (Dial Up, DSL, etc...). Each <item> contains 9 parameters that define the name of the connection type, the video quality, and the audio quality.
Adding connection types
Th list of connection types that shows up in the user interface is totally changeable. Everything you need to do is modify the bandwidth.xml file.
To add connection types, just copy and paste an existing <item> and modify it. Watch out for the XML structure tough. an <item> must be inside <bandwidth>, not inside another <itme element>. The order in which they are in the XMl file is the order in which they show up in the user interface. This is how an <item> tag looks:
<item>
<nm>128 ISDN</nm>
<df>0</df>
<bytes>16000</bytes>
<q>0</q>
<fps>7</fps>
<kfps>28</kfps>
<w>200</w>
<h>150</h>
<snd>8</snd>
</item>
The <nm> tag defines the name of the <item> and it will show up in the AVChat interface in the connection type drop down box.
Modifying the video and audio quality for each item
Video settings
<bytes> This is the maximum amount in bytes that the video (not audio) can use per second. If it is set to 0, the video stream from the user to the FCS will use as much bandwidth as it can.
<q> This is the quality of the video, from o to 100. If set to 0 it will use as much quality as possible, without exceeding the <bytes> value.
<fps> This defines the video frame rate. 10, 15, 30 fps, etc...
<kfps> Advanced feature. This tells AVChat that every kfps frames a full frame will be sent to the FCS. The rest of the frames contain just the changes from the previous frame.
<w> The width of the video in pixels
<h> The height of the video in pixels
Audio settings
<snd> The sound rate. Available values: 5,8,11,22,44. This directly affects the sound quality. The bigger the better. A sound rate of X will use 0,25*X Kbytes/second to send the audio. A sound rate of 11 will use
0,25*11 =2,75 Kbytes/s .
Misc settings
<nm> This is the name of the connection type that will show up in the drop down box in the interface.
<df> If set to 1, this will be the connection type that will be used by default. If more than 1 are set to 1, AVChat will use the last one from top to bottom.
More information:
There is an interesting article on the Macromedia web site regarding best practices for encoding live flash video. Click here to open it.
