Glitchy Video

[dstjohn]

Hi All,

Just received a Tello as a gift and having great fun with it. I'm operating it with my Note 9. I've noticed that, regardless of bitrate setting, range and the state of bluetooth transceiver on my phone, I observe a 'glitch' in the video stream every few seconds. For some glitches, the image freezes very briefly, while for other glitches the image doesn't freeze, but the pixelation of the image changes. I've speculated that this is happening every I-frame in the stream, but have yet to confirm that. When using TelloFPV with "show corruption indicator" enabled, I see the red lightning bolt indicator flash for some but not all of these glitches. Is this normal? Is there a way to eliminate it?

 

[volate!lo]

You can easily identify IFrames when looking at fine grained objects, like grass. An Iframe makes this look blurry,a nd subsequent frames add detail and sharpness to this.

just change the IFrame period to maximum which disables automatic IFrames. In that case the app will only request an iframe when a defect in the stream is detected. Any unnoticed defect will cause long lasting pixel garbage, so this setting is most useful for recording video.
It will give you either perfect video quality, or junk in case of an unnoticed corruption.

 

[dstjohn]

You can easily identify IFrames when looking at fine grained objects, like grass. An Iframe makes this look blurry,a nd subsequent frames add detail and sharpness to this.

just change the IFrame period to maximum which disables automatic IFrames. In that case the app will only request an iframe when a defect in the stream is detected. Any unnoticed defect will cause long lasting pixel garbage, so this setting is most useful for recording video.
It will give you either perfect video quality, or junk in case of an unnoticed corruption.

 

[dstjohn]

Thanks for that, V. I'll give that a try the next time I'm flying it. Is this characteristic of IFrames something specific to the Tello's implementation, or generally true? I"m more than satisfied with the quality of the video coming from the Tello, given its size and price, but would expect this to be unacceptable to someone using a drone to shoot video professionally. Do the Spark or the Mavic Pro exhibit this behavior as well?

 

[volate!lo]

The impact of iframes depends on the implementation details determined by the encoder (in this case tello). With a SD card or onboard memory you would not need any iframes at all, so no problem