Jitsi-meet: Mobile SDK Heating & battery drain Issue, Phone Switch off with warning of over heating

[maulikshah88]

Recently, configured the jitsi on my private server and tested the mobile sdk in multiple android and iPhone devices. I tested with 20 participants for about 20-25 minutes and overall performance was good. In all device within half an hour battery drained by 20-25% and in few android device got a warning message of phone over heating.

Is there any solution to this issue? because with this its not possible to use the jitsi mobile version.

[saghul]

The only thing I can think of it to set lastN to a lower value so you don’t get that many videos, which is a shame, because your device is capable of handling them.

Video conferencing is CPU intensive, there is no way around it. Using hardware accelerated codecs may help, but at the expense of stability (we’ve seen so many crashes) and loss of simulcast, which has serious implications as well.

[maulikshah88]

@saghul thanks for your input, lastN is not a proper solution to this issue.
I was planning to use this for education but if we use lastN we cannot monitor the students behavior and interest in lecture.
The problem persists with 2-3 participants also. I used all latest device including iPhone 11 and Few android latest models with higher CPU and ram configuration. I wondered I tested and using other conferencing solutions for my meetings in which there is no such issue is faced with any of this device.

[saghul]

Anything is on the table, this is all I got at the moment.

[pdarcos]

@maulikshah88 as @saghul explained the reason this happens is due to the fact that many devices don't support HW accelerated encoding/decoding of VP8 codec which jitsi uses (all newer iOS devices have the builtin capability on the intel chip but Apple chooses to not expose it since they only want h264 and h265 (HEVC). It's a commercial/patent/legal issue, not a technical one preventing Apple from offering VP8/9 hw encoding on iDevices.

Android devices (specially the newer ones) should support VP8 hw encoding and many even support VP9 (hopefully full support for VP9 will land on jitsi-meet repo one of these days), so if using only recent android devices with VP8 the battery shouldn't drain as much. Although you'll always get heat since the CPU (or GPU if hw accelerated) has to work hard to encode and decode the streams.

[saghul]

We intenttionally use the SW codec. HW codecs crash, hard. We first disabled it for Samsung, the biggest offender. Then Huawey was the topmost crashing manufacturer, at which point I wondered: "why even try, if these huge companies sselling billions of devices can't gett it right?".

There is also a very important factor: simulcast. You cannot do it with the HW codecs, only with the SW ones.

As for VP9, I'm not holding my breath. It's ssupposed to be more efficient on the network, at the expense of even more CPU usage, and that is not a nice tradeoff here.

[maulikshah88]

Thanks for providing clear details and reason behind the heating issue. So as of now there is no solution to heating issue. I think this is only thing most vulnerable issue with in jitsi mobile app otherwise its working fine you guys have done great work in it, but my results are very bad and 3 devices out 10 had got overheating warning message and call was disconnected and rest of the device including iPhone's was extremely heated in just 20-25 minutes and its not going to work especially when summers are very hot here :) and for me its difficult to ask users to use app until we don't get some proper solution to this.
Thank you @saghul & @pdarcos for quick response and support.

[tdrp]

@maulikshah88 @pdarcos sorry to bring this back up but I am also seeing this issue consistently on iPhones, even modern ones (iPhone X+). It only takes 3 participants and 5 minutes for the iPhone to become too hot to hold. A quick at the app store reviews on Apple/Google for the Jitsi app seem to indicate this is a pervasive problem.

On that same iPhone, I regularly have hour-long Zoom conferences, Facebook, Skype and Whatsapp group video chats and that has never been a problem.

Doing a 1:1 call using AppRTC directly for a similar duration, does result in some heating but not too bad.

I am not familiar with the underlying technology to provide any useful feedback but some small thoughts:
1- Are the streams resized/encoded prior to sending based on the destination tile size? For example, if I am only being shown to other users in a small tile, is my full-size stream sent or just a small tile?

2- Is the CPU work distributed across processors in some way or are they just threads? I understand iPhone X+ has 6 processors but they have different purposes.

[saghul]

There are a couple more things we hopefully will try soon:

• lower the resolution from 720p (this also seems to be what other applications do)

• request a lower simulcast later fo received video (receive 360 or 480 instead of 720)

• add bandwidth limits for the P2P connection

I also have my own piece of anecdata: I’ve been using n iPhone 7 Plus for the last 3 years and regularly having 15+ people meetings no problem. Yes it does get warm, but so does playing a game...

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