The stats panel

How to open VDO.Ninja's statistics panel, what the numbers mean, and how to use them to narrow down the cause of a quality problem.

Every VDO.Ninja video has a live statistics panel behind it. It is the fastest way to answer questions that otherwise turn into guesswork: does the evidence point to the network or the encoder, is audio being sent, and is the bitrate you asked for the bitrate you are getting.

The stats panel on the viewing side. The header stays fixed while the list below it scrolls.

Opening it

Ctrl + click on any video (Cmd + click on macOS). Ctrl + click the same video again to close it.

There are three other ways in:

• Right-click a video and choose Show Stats from the context menu.

• Click the connection readout in the top-right of the header on a publishing page. That opens your own outbound stats.

• On a phone or tablet, tap the video five times in quick succession. Each tap has to land within half a second of the last one, and the sequence resets if you pause.

The header readout on a publishing page: connections, outbound audio streams, outbound video streams, and total upload bitrate. Click it to open your stats.

Press Escape to close the panel, or use the ✕ in its top-right corner.

There are two different panels

Which panel you get depends on which video you clicked, and they show different things. This trips people up constantly, so it is worth being explicit:

You clicked	You get	It tells you
A remote guest's video	The viewer panel	What is arriving at your machine, and what the sender says about themselves
Your own camera preview	The publisher panel	What you are sending, broken down per connected viewer

A useful consequence: if a guest looks bad to you, their publisher panel and your viewer panel describe the same connection from opposite ends. Comparing the two can separate a capture or encoder constraint from a problem on that peer-to-peer path. It cannot, by itself, prove whether packet loss occurred on the sender's uplink, the receiver's downlink, or somewhere in transit.

Panel controls

• Copy puts the entire panel on your clipboard as readable text. This is what you want when asking for help — see asking an AI to read your stats.

• The numbers refresh every 3 seconds by default.

• Refreshing pauses while you are dragging a slider or have text selected inside the panel, so you can select and copy a single value without it disappearing.

Only one panel is open at a time. Ctrl + clicking a second video replaces the panel rather than opening another one, so to compare two guests you need to capture one with Copy before switching to the other.

URL parameters

Parameter	Effect
&stats	Opens the stats panel automatically as soon as a connection is made
&nostats or &stats=0	Disables the panel entirely, and hides it from the right-click menu
&statsinterval=1000	Refresh interval in milliseconds. The minimum is 250

&nostats is worth knowing about for kiosk-style or public-facing scenes, since the panel exposes the machine details of whoever is on the other end.

The 60-second triage

If you only remember one thing from this guide, remember this table. Open the panel on the receiving side and read four numbers.

What you see	What it usually means	Where to go next
Packet Loss above ~1%	Network congestion or a weak link somewhere on the path	Diagnosing problems
Bitrate far below what you asked for	The sender cannot push more, or is being told not to	Diagnosing problems
Candidate type says relay	Traffic is going through a TURN relay, which may add latency or encounter relay capacity limits	Diagnosing problems
Quality limited by says cpu	The sender's machine cannot encode fast enough	Diagnosing problems

These four are useful starting points. The surrounding fields provide the context needed before treating any one reading as a diagnosis.

What "good" looks like

For a healthy 1080p30 connection between two well-connected machines:

Packet Loss           0 %
Round Trip Time       under 100 ms
Candidate type        stable path; direct when available
Quality limited by    none
FPS                   within 1-2 of the sender's capture rate
Jitter Buffer Delay   under ~100 ms
Bitrate               sufficient for the desired quality

None of these are hard thresholds. A 200 ms round trip is completely normal between continents, and 1% packet loss on a cellular uplink may be a good result. An encoder may also stay below its target on a static or low-detail scene because it does not need the extra bits. Read the fields as a relative picture, and compare against the same stream when it was behaving.

Pages in this guide

• Reading the viewer panel — every field on the receiving side

• Reading the publisher panel — every field on the sending side

• Diagnosing problems — symptom-first recipes

• Asking an AI to read your stats — a copy-paste prompt that teaches an LLM what these numbers mean

Related reading

• How to control bitrate/quality

• Stable IRL streaming

• Video bitrate for push/view links

• Handling guest disconnects and connection recovery

• &showconnections — puts the viewer count on the video itself, without opening the panel

• &maxconnections — caps how many viewers a source will accept