Cam Room Facts and Help

[stickyvicky]

If the little red cam icon doesn't appear for you?
It should look like this, and on desktop/laptop its near the bottom left. On mobile devices it will be a different location but still look the same.

memberscams.JPG (10.41 KiB) Viewed 481 times

If you don't see this icon, it could be because you are using a vpn.
Explanation: A vpn is designed to hide your IP address. WebRtc leaks your IP address, therefore the VPN blocks WebRtc to your camera.
Read this its quite fascinating. https://nordvpn.com/blog/webrtc/
Anyway a simple solution is just to disable your vpn while you are on our cam system (if you want to get on cam). I think its still fine to use it just to watch and chat.

The camroom doesn't load for you at all or it's super buggy?
It's possible that your router or your mobile network is blocking UDP. UDP is a requirement for WebRtc streaming. It doesn't matter if the Network tab is yellow, as long as UDP is working you will be able to use the camroom.
Explanation: Unlike all other browser communication which use Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), WebRTC transports its data over User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The requirement for timeliness over reliability is the primary reason why the UDP protocol is a preferred transport for delivery of real-time data.
Go to https://test.webrtc.org
This is what my results look like just as an example:

[stickyvicky]

You cannot vote from the same IP address as a model. (Because models can't vote for themselves.)

[stickyvicky]

If you want to test to see if your webcam is functional at all, go to this page: webcammictest.com

[stickyvicky]

To make sure your chrome is up to date:
Click the 3 dots upper right corner

click help then click about chrome check the version there?

[stickyvicky]

To clear cookies and cache in chrome. It will log you out of the site and start fresh... close all browser windows.

click the 3 dots upper right

click settings

Click "clear browsing data"

check mark browsing history, cookies and other, images and files.

For time range choose "all time"

Stay on basic, do not go into advanced. (so you won't accidently clear your passwords that the browser remembers for you!)

[stickyvicky]

If your cam is on for you but others don't see it, try checking your privacy settings?
From windows start menu
click settings - click privacy - click camera

Maybe you accidently turned off your camera by clicking a combination of Function keys without even realizing it?

Or worse yet, you were messing around in Device Manager and disabled your camera? Now you need to re-enable.

[stickyvicky]

We had an interesting case this week to solve! This person could not access VNALive video. He could see the chat but always got the spinning wheel for video. He kept complaining to me, skype works, my netflix works, everything else works, why doesn't your camshow work? The first thing I thought was that he was on a VPN, but he wasn't. He lives in a condo building and the wifi is provided by the condo association.

We asked him to go in chrome, and press F12 to open the developer tools, then click on "console" to see what errors are happening behind the scenes.
His screen looks like this.

WebRTC requires the use of a STUN server. This acts as a gateway server that helps establish the udp/tcp connection to a webrtc server. There is a public google-owned stun server that we are using - it is used by default by antmedia. Given that google runs it and others can connect, it is incredibly unlikely that it is/was ever down. Most likely his Condo association is blocking the ports required to connect to this STUN server, making it impossible to connect to our system. He actually isn't even getting as far as attempting to connect to our system - he's getting blocked earlier. We asked him to try over mobile network (wifi hotspot). He said he has terrible cell service but will try from a coffee shop internet on his laptop to see.

Hotels do this deliberately, they block access to certain ports, so that you cannot access google stun server therefore webrtc because you would use more bandwidth. They do this to save money? So either his condo association is set up this way deliberately, or the router is badly configured by mistake?

There is not anything we can do to help him, his condo association needs to let him access, or he has to purchase his own internet from an ISP directly.
Just wanted to share that with you!

[stickyvicky]

GETTING ON CAM AS A MEMBER USING A CELL PHONE:
We had turned off the cam feature on cell phones for the past few months while trying to figure out what about it was causing ant media to crash. All they could identify from the logs was that some version of iphone IOS had a bug where (they think) if the member turned the phone sideways, with the rear facing camera it sent some code into the chatroom that caused everyone else to freeze. They never could identify with version of IOS it was specifically.... it even could be a certain phone model itself running a newer version of ios. So we turned off cell phones for a while. We have upgraded Ant Media twice since then... so today we are turning the cell phones back on, 100% for Android, and IOS 14 and up only for Iphones.

I had forgotten that we turned them off till Walt reminded me! Thank you!

So if anyone with Iphone says they can't get on cam, (the button will not appear for them) ask them to be sure they have upgraded their IOS to at least version 14 and the button will appear. Fingers crossed this will be fine!