Color Metric of the Ingest Location

When the user opens the Ingest location combo box, a ping statistic is shown and updated continuously for each of the Ingest locations. Three values are reported:

a) “Last” The last measured and recorded ping round trip time

b) “Avg” The average of the total samples recorded since the combo box was opened (up to the last 100 samples)

c) “Jitter” The statistical variance of all previous samples (up to the last 100 samples)

In short: Less is better. Green is good, yellow is less good, and red should be avoided. Be sure to check your ingest location if your viewers experience lag or if you can’t achieve the upload rate you are used to. Streaming service providers can’t guarantee constant latency due to the complex nature of handling many multiple connections to their servers.

Server latency is important for real time video streaming and also important for bandwidth throughput on TCP based networks. Jitter shows the packet delay variation which is computed based on the previous ping samples using standard deviation formula. Large variations in transit time should also be avoided if possible.

This tester helps to determine the optimal ingest location at any given time. No automatic selection mode is currently implemented, so it is up to the users to select an ingest location that has a low ping and not too big Jitter. In the future it is possible that XSplit will implement an auto mode to automatically quantify the best ingest location when a stream is started. If so then such efforts will be implemented as a collaborative effort with the streaming service providers.

Color metric for ‘Last’ and ‘Avg’:
Green: value < 100ms
Yellow : 100ms <= value < 200ms
Red: 200ms <= value

Color metric for Jitter:
Green: value < 10ms
Yellow: 10ms <= value < 20ms
Red: 20ms <= value

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Richard Stanway (aka R1CH) for the inspiration to built this feature into XSplit.