Recommendations for camera setup (streaming video)

The following recommendation is in addition to Recommendations for camera setup (stored and streaming video).

An additional constraint with streaming applications is internet bandwidth. For live video, Amazon Rekognition only accepts Amazon Kinesis Video Streams as an input. You should understand the dependency between the encoder bitrate and the available network bandwidth. Available bandwidth should, at a minimum, support the same bitrate that the camera is using to encode the live stream. This ensures that whatever the camera captures is relayed through Amazon Kinesis Video Streams. If the available bandwidth is less than the encoder bitrate, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams drops bits based on the network bandwidth. This results in low video quality.

A typical streaming setup involves connecting multiple cameras to a network hub that relays the streams. In this case, the bandwidth should accommodate the cumulative sum of the streams coming from all cameras connected to the hub. For example, if the hub is connected to five cameras encoding at 1.5 Mbps, the available network bandwidth should be at least 7.5 Mbps. To ensure that there are no dropped packets, you should consider keeping the network bandwidth higher than 7.5 Mbps to accommodate for jitters due to dropped connections between a camera and the hub. The actual value depends on the reliability of the internal network.