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Wireshark-users: [Wireshark-users] Troubleshooting video chat dropouts

From: "Noam Birnbaum" <noam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 4 Sep 2012 18:02:44 -0700
Hi everybody,

One of our clients has been complaining that video chats can be extremely choppy, or drop out entirely and require restarting the chat, on Skype and Google Hangouts. It seems to be intermittent, and my first suspicion was simply that the problem resides with the remote correspondents' network. 

However, there have been a number of instances when the remote correspondent was unlikely to be the problem, such as when a chat with a remote correspondent works fine offsite, repeatedly, but not at the office, repeatedly.  There are other such scenarios, like when the remote correspondent has never experienced these problems except when chatting with our client.

We've done the following:

- set videoconferencing to IP Precedence 7 on the client router (Meraki MX60)
- bound video to the less-utilized secondary WAN line

However, rather than waiting to see (again) whether this actually fixes it, I would love to get to the bottom of the problem at the packet level. I am considering running a ring buffer capture for all videoconferencing traffic. I would want to compare videochats that don't exhibit dropouts to those that do. 

Questions:

1. How would you set up the ring buffer capture to filter Skype and Google Hangout chats?  

2. What metrics and methods of comparison would you use to try to isolate the problem in the troublesome captures?

Many thanks!

noam