Streamed video is extremely bocky

[benekreng]

Hi,
The stream I receive on my client is very blocky to where its unusable (640x480). When I use VP8 the quality compared to h264 is 'better' but still not usable for me. As I want to use h264 I digged deeper regarding that. I tested and upstream and downstream speed which is way above anything that would make it the bottleneck. I can only think of a few things.

I am running the server on a raspberry pi so it is forces to use the h264_omx encoder. Maybe there is an issue with the h264_omx encoder?:

  try:
      self.codec, self.codec_buffering = create_encoder_context(
          "h264_omx", frame.width, frame.height, bitrate=self.target_bitrate
      )

I know h264 levels are hard coded:

    codec.options = {
        "profile": "baseline",
        "level": "31",
        "tune": "zerolatency",  # does nothing using h264_omx
    }

But level 3.1 should bring very good results at HD and defenitely at 640x480...

Another overvation I did was when I tried changing the bitread to a too high of a value for level 3.1 I got this log

[libx264 @ 0xffff74002b60] frame MB size (120x68) > level limit (3600)
[libx264 @ 0xffff74002b60] MB rate (244800) > level limit (108000)
[libx264 @ 0xffff74002b60] using cpu capabilities: ARMv8 NEON
[libx264 @ 0xffff74002b60] profile Constrained Baseline, level 3.1, 4:2:0, 8-bit

which says "profile Constrained Baseline"? Whatever that means.
If I change the hardcoded level and profile in the library will this bring improvement or is it likely because of something else?
Any help would be apprechiated.