Intermittent Corruption/Pixelation in Raw h.264 Video Stream from Zoom RTMS

Realtime Media Streams
1

Hi All,

We are currently implementing a solution using Zoom’s RTMS service and are running into an issue with the integrity of the raw video data.

What’s Working: We have successfully set up our application based on the official zoom/rtms-samples (both JS and SDK versions). We are correctly receiving webhook events and are able to capture the audio, video, and transcript data streams.

The Problem: Our core issue is that the raw .h264 video files we save are intermittently corrupted. We are seeing random pixelation, artifacts, and glitches at various points in the video

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Crucially, this corruption exists in the source .h264 file itself, before we perform any processing or conversion with FFmpeg. While we have also worked through the known challenges of converting the stream to a playable MP4, the source file’s quality is our primary concern.

What We’ve Tried:

  • Tested with multiple official samples, including save-video and record-audio-and-video-advance.

  • Verified the issue occurs with both the Node.js and SDK-based samples.

  • Searched the developer forums and documentation for similar issues but haven’t found any reports of this specific problem with the raw stream.

This leads us to believe we might be missing a key configuration step or best practice. Has anyone encountered this before? We’re looking for any advice on how to ensure we receive a clean, complete .h264 stream from the RTMS service.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

2

@BharadwajVarma

Please tag me in your response.

Does this corruption happen at frequent interval? I’m trying to figure out if this is a sample issue or source issue.

The h264 stream has a GOP where there are typically key I frames before predicted p frames. In scenarios where there are not too much delta or changes in the scene, there will be much lesser I frames.

The save video sample does a very naive implementation where it just saves everything without any such consideration.

The advance save video sample does something slightly better, as it pads the muted video and audio with black video frames and silent audio frames. This sample similarly might not have taken into consideration the above information

Im still working on the sample for this scenario, but let me know if problems still existing considering the above information

3

@BharadwajVarma ,

We have identified the issue, and will be working to improve the quality of video buffer delivery to prevent the issue observed above.

A fix will be rolled out in a couple of weeks time.

1 Like
4

@BharadwajVarma could you test this out again and let me know your observations?

We have rolled out some changes on our side

5

why rtms stopped working ? @chunsiong.zoom their scopes are gone what is the issue and how it can be resolved ? Guide us please

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@Muhammad13 please open a new thread and tag me instead. I’ll reach out to you for more details on your account