Hi
Has anyone experienced listeners complaining about buffering when listening on mobile devices?
Any tips on finding out why they might be getting this and how to improve their listening experience?
thanks
Mobile devices are mostly limited by CPU and bandwidth. As long as you use Frankie Pro streamer (instead of any third-party encoder), it automatically encodes a very light version (about 600kbps including audio) of the video which should work with most mobile connections.
The CPU is much harder to tackle on the Web as the live page we currently use needs to scale all the way from huge 8k resolutions to the tiniest ~300x600 mobile display. This makes the page non-trivial to load and even though we drop some of the UI elements (like the emoticon picker) from mobile clients, they still need to load and run quite a bit of code just to display the page.
That said, most recently modern mobile devices should be able to render the page just fine as the most complex part in the UI is the video player which again is quite simple. For older and low-end devices I recommend toggling the video off and preferring wifi over mobile data when possible.
Currently there are two things that are totally unoptimzed that will help mobile clients in the future: 1) allowing manual video resolution change, and 2) delivering video over CDN. The first one is fairly easy to do and is on the pipeline already, the latter is a matter of money and unfortunately can’t be fixed until we get enough Frankie Pro subscribers to make the subscriptions cover our general hosting fees.
There is one obvious extra solution as well: to build native clients which can handle everything much more efficiently. Alas, we don’t currently have resources for this either. (Any help is appreciated!)