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Hey alex, can you try upgrading to version 0.17.x, there's been many improvements to the client SDKs since then. Bitrate should be respected.. you can try it with the sample app we've included. It will print out the current send bitrate.

Ok, thanks David, will try 0.17 👍

another thing is.. in general Chrome will obey the max bitrate. but if it doesn't need the bits to encode current frames. it'll use a lower bitrate than set

Cool, good to know.

Hi @dry-elephant-14928 - I've updated to 0.17.4 but am still seeing the same behaviour re bitrates not being respected. It looks like framerates aren't respected either but that might be down to actual camera / webcam device specs. I'm attaching screengrabs here of chrome webrtc stats for video presets h180, h216 and h1080. • h180 target bitrate = 120kbps, actual bitrate = 600kbps • h216 target bitrate = 180kbps, actual bitrate = 1 - 1.5mbps • h1080 target bitrate = 3mbps, actual bitrate = 2.5mbps Tested on 2x Macbook Pros (with Apple Silicon) and an Intel Mac. Happy to do more in-depth testing and report back if useful to you guys, let me know? We've previously only been able to limit or 'force' bitrates by modifying the SDP ("b=AS") - not with LiveKit - and at the time we did it only Chrome and Safari respected bitrate limits higher than 2.5mbps, Firefox would max out at 2.5mbps. As an aside, we also used SDP modification to force browsers to publish and playback stereo audio in webrtc (rather than mono).

Is this reproducible with the sample js app? there you can see the real-time bitrate information displayed on top of the video tile

Ah yes - you did mention that. I've just checked the sample js app and the lower bitrate limitations do work there, so I must be doing something wrong in my implementation. Will fix. Sorry for the false report. Out of interest, I tried the higher presets too, but the 'unable to publish higher than 2,500kbps' behaviour seems to persist. I used a FaceTime camera as well as a virtual camera generated using OBS (at 1080p and 2160p source resolution with high-motion content).. might be that Chrome reckoned it didn't need to encode more than 2,500kbps but I'm not sure. Previously when I've set a bitrate of 8,000kbps in 1080p (again, not with LiveKit), Chrome has maxed out at about 7,000kbps encoding with high-motion content. This is not relevant to our current implementation, but thought I'd mention it in case useful info for anyone else. Thanks for your pointers, David.