BlakeDahlia said:
What's ping?
A few months ago I downgraded my service a bit to save money. I have no idea where I was at before but now it's:
Download: 25.13 Mbps
Upload: 4.23 Mbps
Ping: 14 Ms
Besides paying for a faster connection, is there anything I can do to increase these numbers? Especially the upload speed as I guess that's more important for camming.
No idea what you know about terms, so apologies if this seems a bit patronising
Ping is - ack, if you're in a cave and you shout - you get an echo. The longer the echo takes to be heard, the "further away" the surface that the sound is bouncing off is. Ships use sonar to check depth doing the same thing, and if you've watched war films where a submarine is being hunted and you hear the "ping" of the sonar (and the response) - well... same concept.
Ping is an electronic version of that, measuring how long it takes to get a response from somewhere. Essentially it "shouts" from your computer to the end computer, and the end computer returns the shout back, and the time taken displayed. Shout is actually packets of data. Ping can vary greatly from second to second, so it sends many packets and takes the average time to get them back. It can also then see if any didn't return (packet loss).
"Is there anything I can do to increase these numbers". Speed depends upon infrastructure/connection types. I'm guessing you've got cable as that's a great connection.
With webcams the video feed is essentially x pictures being sent per second, and sound. The pictures are compressed and they use some nice maths to actually make it even better - but it's all data. The bigger/more quality the image, the more data it takes to show it, and therefore the more data needs to be sent. You can upload almost as much data per second as I can download... it's good!
The amount sent per second is related to the quality you have. HD cams may require more up bandwidth, but if you've got some reasonable firewall you can probably check out how much you are using when transmitting. Having a "fast" connection matters
to a point (bandwidth is more correct than "speed" - but we tend to talk about fast for some reason), but think of it with a pipe analogy. A pipe that can transit 10 litres of water per minute could be your cam upstream with normal resolution. It may need 20 litres per minute for "hd" (mfc doesn't do it, but other sites do). If your pipe can take 25 litres per minute, then you wouldn't need more pipe - it won't make any difference. You could upgrade to a pipe that takes 200 litres per minute, but since you're only pouring 20 litres per minute into the pipe - it doesn't get the water out any quicker
So that was a shite explanation for why, unless your cam requires more bandwidth then it is currently using (i'd be bloody horrified if it did) you won't need to upgrade as it won't make any difference whatsoever
Others may shoot my explanations/analogies full of holes, and yeah, it's overly long winded too... but meh. I hadn't posted for days, so I'd saved up