Calculating AVChat 3 bandwidth usage
About bandwidth usage
The bandwidth usage/month depends on many factors and can never be guessed without several days of actual running the video chat software on your website:
- number of people online watching cams and how much time they spend watching
- number of people online broadcasting cams and how much time they spend broadcasting
- how many cams a user can see at once
- audio/video quality (128,256,512kbits/s etc…)
For example a user broadcasting its webcam for 30 minutes at 256kbits/s will use 57Mbytes of bandwdith (256kbits/s * 60 seconds * 30 minutes=57Mbytes).
Another user viewing the first one for 30 minutes will use the same amount: 57Mbytes. Total: 114Mbytes for a 30 minute 1 to 1 video chat session.
Reducing bandwidth usage
AVChat 3 offers several ways to reduce the monthly bandwidth used on the media server:
- the automatic bandwidth reduction feature which is on by default
- you can lower the audio/video quality for the streams so that they use less bandwidth
- you can limit the amount of time/day users can view web cams
- you can limit the amount of web cams users can view at once (4 by default)