# Live streaming is choppy, jerky - advice?

**URL:** <https://community.wowza.com/t/live-streaming-is-choppy-jerky-advice/46208>\
**Category:** Wowza Streaming Engine\
**Created:** [November 27, 2015, 1:26pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/live-streaming-is-choppy-jerky-advice/46208 "2015-11-27T13:26:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Everett\_Leonidas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e8c25b/32.png) [@Everett\_Leonidas](https://community.wowza.com/u/Everett_Leonidas)\
**Post date:** [November 27, 2015, 1:26pm UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/live-streaming-is-choppy-jerky-advice/46208/1 "2015-11-27T13:26:34Z")

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The use case we are developing is a one-to-many live streaming webcast from a user’s webcam using flash encoding through a Chrome browser.

We are currently in development, so at maxmium, there is one incoming live stream and 2 outgoing streams from our media server. The server is 4-core, Xeon, with 16gb of memory. I have an upload test speed of 8Mbps and download test of 80Mbps.

We are having issues with video quality on the receiving end, playing back through a Chrome browser. The video is choppy and jerky, basically it is skipping frames. For my use case, this choppiness will fail user acceptance. I was aspiring for the smooth, high quality playback of services like [Twitch.tv](http://Twitch.tv).

I watched the following tutorial and noticed the presenter’s feed is also choppy. Is this normal and expected with Wowza? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNcM3\_zFqzM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNcM3_zFqzM)

My questions are:

1. How can improve the quality of the viewer video? I can accept worse latency since it is a webcast use case. I want to get to that Twitch-level quality.

2. What should I expect for the smoothest level of playback?

3. Are “choppy” and “jerky” the right nomenclature for my describing my issue?

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**Author:** ![sal\_jefferson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6de8d8/32.png) [@sal\_jefferson](https://community.wowza.com/u/sal_jefferson)\
**Post date:** [November 30, 2015, 6:31am UTC](https://community.wowza.com/t/live-streaming-is-choppy-jerky-advice/46208/2 "2015-11-30T06:31:27Z")

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Can you provide detail about the incoming stream:

What is the video and audio codec?

Keyframe interval(GOP length)?

FPS?

What player are you testing playback in?

For RTMP playback, choppiness is usually a bitrate/bandwidth problem. It might be a bottle-neck between the encoder and Wowza, or between Wowza and the playback client you are testing.

You can use this [tool at the playback client location](https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-test-server-to-client-bandwidth-for-rtmp-clients) to measure bandwith between Wowza and that client location.

And you can use this [tool at the encoder location](https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-check-bandwidth-from-client-to-server-to-test-uplink-to-be-used-by-a-live-stream-encoder-moduleclientbwcheck%28ModuleClientBWCheck%29) to measure client to Wowza bandwidth

You can eliminate the encoder-side, for testing purposes, by creating a server-side stream using [this scheduler](https://www.wowza.com/docs/how-to-schedule-streaming-with-wowza-streaming-engine-streampublisher%28StreamPublisher%29).

Regards,

Salvadore