For example, if I was on a rocket to mars and transmitting a video stream back to earth non-stop for the duration of the journey…
At the begining when I am leaving earth, the lag between me transmitting the video and earth recieving it would be basically nothing. But by the time I get to mars there is a delay of 3 minutes or whatever between send and recieve.
What happens to the video during the journey? Do some frames randomly drop? Does the video have to buffer constantly? Is there an incremental decrease in quality over time?
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In practical terms we will never have to deal with this, because the speeds at which we travel will never come close to exhausting a buffer. Mars is about 20 light-minutes away at its closest, but it takes four or five months to get there, so the delay is so gradual you won’t have any technical problems even if the stream is nonstop the whole way (it would start “live” and end up delayed by 20 minutes). We might experience this in the coming years as Artemis missions may well include continuous live-streams, but that will be three days to get to 1.5 seconds of delay.
If you have a hypothetical ship that could accelerate to significant fractions of light-speed right out of the gate, then you would have a buffering problem, but you’d have to be going so fast that the distance you travel between frames is more than the refresh rate of the stream. I don’t think I can do the math to figure that out.
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