The clock-based jump-to-live detector compares wall-clock receive time against
the CONNECT-TIME skew offset. A wall-clock step on either end (NTP mid-session,
resume-from-sleep correction) shifts every future frame's apparent latency by a
constant: past the 400 ms bound the detector fires forever — one backlog flush +
recovery IDR every 2 s cooldown, and the bitrate controller rides the repeated
"flushed" bad windows down to its floor. A stream that was perfectly live turns
into a periodic quality pulse with no recovery path.
The tell is in the flush itself: a genuine 400 ms backlog is ≥~170 datagrams
even at the 5 Mbps bitrate floor, but a clock-step flush finds nothing to
discard. So: two consecutive clock-triggered flushes that discarded <64
datagrams and zero queued AUs disarm the clock detector for the session (logged).
This also covers upstream router bufferbloat — delay standing in a queue a local
flush can't drain, where the OWD signal to the bitrate controller is the actual
remedy and a 2 s IDR cadence only feeds the congestion. The clock-free
queue-depth detector stays armed either way; it measures the local queue
directly and can't be fooled by a clock.
Rode along: the 11-field `Negotiated` tuple is now a documented struct — the
connect/worker plumbing reads as named fields instead of positional magic.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehler
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