WebRTC Video and Voice Chat Issues

Has there been an official roll20 response to all the video and voice issues that I missed? I don't know anyone that uses roll20 that isn't having problems with it.

anthony f. said: Has there been an official roll20 response to all the video and voice issues that I missed? I don't know anyone that uses roll20 that isn't having problems with it. Yes. There were responses in the previous thread on this topic (now locked) and there has been one update rolled out to improve the stability. Some users has reported improvements but it is still unusable for my group. Like you I have never encountered anyone that has tried to use the built in audio/video that has not had major issues with it. However, according to roll20 dev statements in the previous thread the majority of users are not having any issues. I remain mildly sceptical towards the correctness of this statement.

Karl V. said: anthony f. said: Has there been an official roll20 response to all the video and voice issues that I missed? I don't know anyone that uses roll20 that isn't having problems with it. Yes. There were responses in the previous thread on this topic (now locked) and there has been one update rolled out to improve the stability. Some users has reported improvements but it is still unusable for my group. Like you I have never encountered anyone that has tried to use the built in audio/video that has not had major issues with it. However, according to roll20 dev statements in the previous thread the majority of users are not having any issues. I remain mildly sceptical towards the correctness of this statement. I second these remarks.

I think the problem is that the people that have success with it, do not post in this thread.&nbsp; My group gets it running and it works much better than it used to. There are a few some things that pop up now and again, but it's worked for me and my group the past couple of sessions. I will say that all of my players experience really bad frames in Chrome, but they have said they see me at a good 30fps and I use firefox because of this. If I pop into chrome, it's terrible (Frame loss, video feed very jittery), but this may have to do with an update that chrome did or something like that. can't convince them to hop on firefox though, so I guess we'll live with for now. Here's part of a session where I had to switch to chrome (firefox, roll20 & my mic did not want to work spontaneously for 15 mins) <a href="https://youtu.be/paQtueL9leI?t=44m30s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/paQtueL9leI?t=44m30s</a> and then here is the same session, but when I switched back to firefox so my players could see me clearly <a href="https://youtu.be/paQtueL9leI?t=1h13m45s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/paQtueL9leI?t=1h13m45s</a> Don't know if it's a browser issue that makes that glitch or roll20 coding though.

My group is in-game right now. We had the same old problems as always using Roll20 A/V. People randomly stop being able to hear certain players, we all reconnect, then everything might work for 10 or 15 minutes, then someone isn't able to hear someone else and it starts snowballing again. We just gave up on it and we're using Hangouts for A/V right now. Bummer. :(

Having the same issues with our group. &nbsp;If it's not fixed this week, I will stop subscribing. &nbsp;The lack of basic functionality has gone on for too long, and they're been aware of the issue and the cause this whole time. &nbsp;If you think it's hard to fix now, try it with subs bailing.

Last night - we had six people in game and no connection problems what so ever. Random?

Ravenknight said: Last night - we had six people in game and no connection problems what so ever. Random? Think so. We were trying to run with 2 players last night. Worked for about 20 min, then it got unstable and we had to go for an alternative solution.

For anyone still having problems with voice/video, you could also try vsee.com and use their video conferencing program. The website is geared more towards doctors and such, but the messenger program itself is free and has some good features for streamers. The video windows sit on top of everything else with no background or anything and can be moved around anywhere.

Jason E. said: Having the same issues with our group. &nbsp;If it's not fixed this week, I will stop subscribing. &nbsp;The lack of basic functionality has gone on for too long, and they're been aware of the issue and the cause this whole time. &nbsp;If you think it's hard to fix now, try it with subs bailing. Yeah, unfortunately, I'm thinking the same thing. At least cancelling my subscription until this is fixed. I really do love Roll20. We used it with Hangouts for almost two years and it has been fantastic. Now though, without Hangouts support, Roll20 is pretty much unusable.&nbsp; Edit: During our February 4th game,&nbsp;video seemed to be working fine, oddly enough. It was audio that kept on cutting out to and from random people, and doing the whack-a-mole thing. We tried doing voice only to cut down on bandwidth usage, but this made absolutely no difference at all.

Out of curiosity, is this still being worked on or are we at a stage now where it's "good enough?" I ask because it's been a bit over two weeks since the last dev response in here. In the meantime, we'll be using a different service for voice and video now that it seems like there's no immediate resolution in sight. The game must go on! I'll just check back every month or two to see if the issue is fixed yet or not.

Looker D. said: Out of curiosity, is this still being worked on or are we at a stage now where it's "good enough?" I ask because it's been a bit over two weeks since the last dev response in here. In the meantime, we'll be using a different service for voice and video now that it seems like there's no immediate resolution in sight. The game must go on! I'll just check back every month or two to see if the issue is fixed yet or not. I certainly hope they're still working on it. &nbsp;I've put my current game on hold hoping that a couple of weeks would get the problems resolved. &nbsp;Eagerly awaiting some news.

I keep seeing this "factoid" that roll20 users, "mostly" do not have a problem with the chat system... You know why? I'll enlighten you. They don't use it. It's as simple as that. I don't post having any problems with roll20's system because I just don't freaking use it. I use Discord, which will soon be utilizing video, so it's about to be the perfect app. I don't have any problems, report any problems, or bother filling out bug reports, because I'm a user, not a dev. I'm not being paid to troubleshoot a broken program and what I do get paid for, I pay you some of, so that I can have fun here. I've already cancelled my sub... And honestly, I hope you guys get this fixed, I wish you the best of luck. Seems like you need it... I guess call/email me when you get it working. Thinking of moving my games to the local game shop anyways... I mean, why not right? All my long distance friends gave up playing weeks ago on here...

Yeah just to add to the growing list of folks with issues, we haven't been able to use video/chat in Roll20 for 3 weeks now. We use Skype for the video chat and use Roll20 for the desktop stuff

Just adding my report to the pile: video has been unusable for my group for 2+ months . We've since started using Skype video. My sub with Roll20 is starting to feel really silly.

It's been a few weeks. Are there any murmurs at all from the devs about this? Even if it's just a "we're still working on it", that would be fine. From the troubleshooting guide it appears that it's merely a bandwidth issue and if you want more than two or three players, people without access to a fast upload are just out of luck.

Kristin C. said: Hello everyone. I wanted to let everyone know that we're still actively working on ways to improve stability and minimizing bandwidth requirements for WebRTC. The feature clearly doesn't work for a percentage of our userbase, so that's not something that we can simply let lie as is, nor put a "Task Complete" stamp on it development-wise. WebRTC is still pretty new, with very sparse documentation available, so advancements to make this feature better is going to progress in awkward jumps and stalls. The Roll20 admin team is very small, with two coders alongside Roll20's co-founder Riley. They have to hold the line on several fronts in regards to the bugs that crop up on the platform and designing future development. Not to tell you how to do your job, or run your business....but the last statement of "holding the line for bugs....and designing future development" should not apply to this issue. &nbsp;This was a broken update, has been broken for 3+ months, and as stated by SFX, I feel that most users are either not reporting or have given up. &nbsp; That being said this thread is 20 days old and has been viewed 2993 (at time of me posting this), that averages out to 149.65 views a day. &nbsp;So there are a few ways to look at this...on average, 149 people a day have a concern to check on the status of this issue or have some curiosity about the issue. &nbsp;To put this into perspective, the post New to Roll20 or RPG? &nbsp;Need Guidance?... has been viewed 122746 and is ABOUT a year old, so by average 336.29 people a day look at this post. &nbsp;Volo's Guide Bug report, which is 3 months old has 6178, so this would average out to 63.69 people a day. This should show the volume of people that are concerned about this issue. I know the devs and PR team are tired of this issue, as are the users, but I think every available resource needs to focus on fixing THIS issue. &nbsp;I think that new developments need to be put on the back burner until the core gaming system, the one that is so heavily advertised and promoted, is working to 99% reliability. &nbsp;Not to mention that I feel you increase the possibility of breaking more things and getting further behind the 8 ball. Are we to understand that the devs, found the issue, but do not have a resolution at this time? &nbsp;Has any consideration been given to engineering a new solution?

Our group has also not been able to see each other ingame. It works fine for the DM but players usually only get like 1-2 video streams for short amounts of time until they freeze again. This has been going on for at least a month.

We gave up on voice and just use discord. Perhaps we'll try it again when an improvement has been made. Video has been quite hit or miss. Lately more hit than miss, but nothing close to reliably able to see all members.

Kristin C. said: Hello everyone. I wanted to let everyone know that we're still actively working on ways to improve stability and minimizing bandwidth requirements for WebRTC. The feature clearly doesn't work for a percentage of our userbase, so that's not something that we can simply let lie as is, nor put a "Task Complete" stamp on it development-wise. WebRTC is still pretty new, with very sparse documentation available, so advancements to make this feature better is going to progress in awkward jumps and stalls. The Roll20 admin team is very small, with two coders alongside Roll20's co-founder Riley. They have to hold the line on several fronts in regards to the bugs that crop up on the platform and designing future development. Thank you very much for the update. I'm very relieved to hear that it's still being worked on, so I can keep hoping that it'll be resolved. I'm eagerly awaiting the day we can get back to using only Roll20.

It is quite possible that R20 has contractual obligations to WotC since they are producing D&D material within R20.&nbsp; That might account for the sparse resources for this issue?&nbsp; Just trying to stay objective; we don't really know what's going on behind the curtain. That being said, I'm glad that someone from R20 finally chimed back in and I appreciate what they posted.&nbsp; I hope that this problem can be resolved soon as it clearly is affecting so many.

Kristin C. said: Hello everyone. I wanted to let everyone know that we're still actively working on ways to improve stability and minimizing bandwidth requirements for WebRTC.&nbsp; Hi Kristin & devs. &nbsp;Thanks for tuning in here. &nbsp;I do want to bring up the prospect that the problem is not about bandwidth requirements for WebRTC. &nbsp;We documented this extensively for our own case here in an effort to help find the bugs: <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/4516830/webrtc-v" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/4516830/webrtc-v</a>... The phenomenon that seems to correlate best with which of us in my group has the most trouble connecting is the number of WebRTC instances that are spawned. &nbsp;Not bandwidth; we have plenty of that. &nbsp;No expert on WebRTC here, but my understanding is that each user should have one instance per other person in video chat (because separate peer-to-peer connections). &nbsp;I accumulated well over a hundred instances in a few hours. &nbsp;Others in my group also accumulated instances, but fewer (e.g., several tens). &nbsp; Point is, many of us here are trying to help. &nbsp;Please don't hunker down and become defensive, or keep suggesting that it's a minority of users who are having troubles with your WebRTC implementation. &nbsp;Maybe so, but doesn't seem like that to me, not sure how you'd learn that, and it doesn't matter anyway. &nbsp;It'd be great if you kept us posted on what you're thinking and trying. &nbsp;Plenty of gamers are also coders and might even have some insights for you if they have an idea of what you're stuck on at present. &nbsp;You've got an engaged community; so engage. &nbsp;At the very least we will get less grouchy. &nbsp;

It occurs to me, frex, that transient blips in net connectivity which would not be noticed under most circumstances could induce the generation of a new WebRTC connection and leave the previous connection's UDP ports "dangling", so they accumulate until bad things happen. &nbsp;So a solution might be either to identify and 'smooth over' such blips programmatically so as to keep existing UDP connections alive for longer before dropping them, and/or to scan for dangling ports and clean them up. &nbsp;There's a thread by some KMS programmers on this issue; one proposed a heartbeat mechanism to solve this problem (equivalent to scan and cleanup), eg via sockjs (Javascript). &nbsp;The thread is here in case this turns out be useful: &nbsp; <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/kurento/oh" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/kurento/oh</a>... &nbsp; &nbsp;

I tested it with a few friends today and it seemed rather stable, however the limited size of just up to 200x200 makes it still unusable for me/us, free scalability would be perfect but a resolution of 4x of large would be the minimum (400x400)

We gave up on it now and moved to discord.... not worked fully for us all since you took over webrtc. Really should reduce the cost of the service for removing the ability to use one of your main features.

Just throwing in my group is also having consistant issues with voice. We spend about an hour doing the reconnect, relog, volume control trick hokey pokey before giving up and using google hangouts. I really hope you can get this sorted to something that is usable soon, it is a great feature and we all love roll20 but this is incredibly frustrating and as a GM I hate having extra things I shouldn't need up when I already have a buried screen of notes etc.

Tried this with a new group of players yesterday. Constant interruptions by the whack-a-mole mini-game. Managed to just barely get through 3h of game time with easily half on hour wasted on trouble shooting connections. Not buying the "its working for almost everyone". At all. It is simply not working. At all.

SkyCaptainXIII said: For anyone still having problems with voice/video, you could also try vsee.com and use their video conferencing program. The website is geared more towards doctors and such, but the messenger program itself is free and has some good features for streamers. The video windows sit on top of everything else with no background or anything and can be moved around anywhere. <a href="http://www.vsee.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.vsee.com</a> Just reminder for people looking for a simple interim voice/video solution that does not take up a lot of screen real estate like google hangouts does.

Karl V. said: Not buying the "its working for almost everyone". At all. It is simply not working. At all. It's definitely working for some, and at least in my experience it has worked better in the last few weeks than it had in prior weeks. But I don't get the impression it works consistently for the majority of people who try it. This isn't at all scientific, but I ran a quick poll on Twitter:&nbsp; <a href="https://twitter.com/pixelscapes/status/82984609015" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/pixelscapes/status/82984609015</a>... Removing the "huh" results and just comparing the remainder: 25% said it works well enough for their group. 75% said it doesn't work well enough for them. In the comments you'll see some suggestions for other tech to use. Regardless, I am glad the roll20 staff replied here to give us an update and that they're continuing to work on it. Thank you!

Just wanted to post here that video and voice worked for my group for about 5 hours last night without any problems. This was the first time in three months we have been able to play without resorting to another A/V option. Fingers crossed this continues for our next session in two weeks.

Rabulias said: Just wanted to post here that video and voice worked for my group for about 5 hours last night without any problems. This was the first time in three months we have been able to play without resorting to another A/V option. Fingers crossed this continues for our next session in two weeks. Just curious as to how many players you had in your session?

Rabulias said: Just wanted to post here that video and voice worked for my group for about 5 hours last night without any problems. This was the first time in three months we have been able to play without resorting to another A/V option. Fingers crossed this continues for our next session in two weeks. I've got the same experience. Two sessions played with 6 people on the VTT without having to reconnect all the time. It's definitely more stable now then it was a week ago.

Same here - session with 6 on Thursday. A couple of issues, mostly involving a player with wonky internet to begin with, but the reconnect button was repairing it pretty much instantly. Even without any voice/video functionality, Roll20 is worth the price of a pro subscription to me. I'm happy to support the devs, who are doing this as a labor of love as much as a business enterprise. Having said that, its not fully stable yet, and there are certainly still a lot of existing, legitimate complaints, so I hope the devs will keep working on it.

Level2Gamers said: Just curious as to how many players you had in your session? There were 5 of us online Friday night.

Oh dear god. Our last session started in google hangouts, but one of our players couldnt get the Roll20 app to load, and kept getting dropped audio and video. So we decided, hey lets try the native roll20 webRTC. Not a single person could even get the roll20 interface to load with the A/V activated, let alone video or audio. Roll20 froze, crashed, and hung up on every thing you would try to do. We had to actually use email because the chat in Roll20 was even frozen. I had tested my download and upload speed the night before, and I have over a 60mbps download and 5mbps upload speed. With three players, and the A/V set to its lowest settings I should have no problem. But whatever is in the coding for webRTC ate up 100% of my system resources and bandwidth. After 20 minutes we just loaded roll20 without A/V, and used hangouts for A/V. That worked like a charm. This plus a video recorder running the whole time only used 30% of my system resources. Not only has this gotten worse than the last time we tried, but it seems to be effecting Hangouts in a way to cause issues there too. I'm giving this a few more weeks and cancelling my subscription. I dont pay a sub to spend half our sessions trying to trouble shoot a system that should have been fixed within weeks of forcing it down our throats.

Neil M. said: Kristin C. said: Hello everyone. I wanted to let everyone know that we're still actively working on ways to improve stability and minimizing bandwidth requirements for WebRTC. The feature clearly doesn't work for a percentage of our userbase, so that's not something that we can simply let lie as is, nor put a "Task Complete" stamp on it development-wise. WebRTC is still pretty new, with very sparse documentation available, so advancements to make this feature better is going to progress in awkward jumps and stalls. The Roll20 admin team is very small, with two coders alongside Roll20's co-founder Riley. They have to hold the line on several fronts in regards to the bugs that crop up on the platform and designing future development. Not to tell you how to do your job, or run your business....but the last statement of "holding the line for bugs....and designing future development" should not apply to this issue. &nbsp;This was a broken update, has been broken for 3+ months, and as stated by SFX, I feel that most users are either not reporting or have given up. &nbsp; This. When an issue breaks basic functionality for the majority of your users, it becomes an emergency dev priority. We had the same problems last session, though less severe. &nbsp;As promised, I'm pulling my subscription.

Kristin C. said: Hello everyone. I wanted to let everyone know that we're still actively working on ways to improve stability and minimizing bandwidth requirements for WebRTC. The feature clearly doesn't work for a percentage of our userbase, so that's not something that we can simply let lie as is, nor put a "Task Complete" stamp on it development-wise. WebRTC is still pretty new, with very sparse documentation available, so advancements to make this feature better is going to progress in awkward jumps and stalls. The Roll20 admin team is very small, with two coders alongside Roll20's co-founder Riley. They have to hold the line on several fronts in regards to the bugs that crop up on the platform and designing future development. Thank you for letting us know that there is still movement on this issue. This is incredibly frustrating.

Yes, thank you Kristin! Now, is there anything we can do to help you? Do these "It works/doesn't for me" posts help at all? Last thread you needed us to run some tests... would those still help? There were also some good-sounding points made earlier observing that multiple webRTC sessions were not closing out as one might expect.

Have been having a lot of issues with the Roll 20 chat feature as of late. I can see my GM only out of a group of about 5 people - with 2 other video broadcasters. No amount of reloading, clearing cache or reconnecting makes any sort of difference. No other browsers &nbsp;are working for me either. Its extremely frustrating because I cannot find any information anywhere on troubleshooting this problem. I would just like to figure out what is going on so I can enjoy my games fully - something is lost when you can't see faces.

Checking in: My group tested out video last night. I run a game for 6 players. While they were trickling in, we tested out video. Everything worked fine with 5 of us in the game. When the 6th person arrived, there was a minor hiccup or two but it seemed to be mostly okay. When the 7th person arrived, it couldn't handle it any more, so we left to use Skype instead. I know others have reported this behavior, just confirming that it has been my experience as well.

Me and my group have been having problem with the video. It seems that if a person is broadcasting video while receiving&nbsp;then he wont be able to see any other player than himself. The exact same problem&nbsp;occurs with every person in the group with different browsers. We haven't played much this year but the video was working fine just after Christmas.

Neil M. said: Not to tell you how to do your job, or run your business....but the last statement of "holding the line for bugs....and designing future development" should not apply to this issue. &nbsp;This was a broken update, has been broken for 3+ months, and as stated by SFX, I feel that most users are either not reporting or have given up. &nbsp; This update, quite clearly, was not tested nearly as thoroughly as it should have been. I personally would not care to see any new development until core features (i.e. A/V chat) are stabilized. With other platforms using WebRTC (like appear.in) very reliably to provide even screen sharing on mobile devices, I have to wonder if the flaw lies less in the technology, and more in...other areas. While it is my fervent hope that the R20 team is able to stabilize audio and video chat for roll20, likely I will be using other alternatives, and may go so far as to move my players and I to Fantasy Grounds, or some other virtual tabletop, as loath as I am to do it. We seem to have a hard limit of 5 players, with a 6th player introducing stability issues for everyone. With six, or occasionally seven players, plus myself, this is not acceptable.

I'll chime in and say our group also gave up and started using Discord.

Update.&nbsp; We played (GM + 5 players) last night, and I would like to think it was a little better in some ways, maybe not in others.&nbsp; Started up with most of us seeing most of us.&nbsp; I had it worst again, for whatever reason, accumulating &gt;200 WebRTC sessions in Chrome [that has GOT to be part of the problem] until I just couldn't make Roll20 work properly.&nbsp; Restarted in Firefox and that seemed more stable, though I don't know how to check the # of sessions in FF.&nbsp; Later on that evening we had a substantial block of time, like an hour, without glitches.&nbsp; Even the glitches just meant that one or two of us had to reconnect, and that would usually work after a couple of minutes' wait.&nbsp; So not acceptable per se, but I think better than it was.&nbsp; Here's hoping!&nbsp; Please prioritize this; I'll be happy when this whole problem is ancient history and the video chat with all the trimmings is just a part of the background again.&nbsp; Previous post re WebRTC sessions:&nbsp; <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/4516830/webrtc-v" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/4516830/webrtc-v</a>...

We were trying a game of 5 total and the 3rd player on to join started seeing problems with voice chat (we disabled video) - running a mix of google chrome and firefox. Very disappointing. &nbsp;The site has so many great features but this is a real downer.

Update: Everything ran fine, but the stuttering issues that arise with google chrome are still present. Things run smoothly in firefox (no video stuttering), but my players use chrome. I show up clearly and smoothly for all my players, but everyone using chrome shows up stuttery for all parties. The blue bar is also laggy.

Interesting that Chrome seems worse for some people then Firefox. When I use Firefox I can't see or hear anybody. Chrome usually works fine.