Method and apparatus for using a network appliance to manage media communications

A method of managing communication of encoded media from a plurality of media sources, the method comprising:

• determining, by a network appliance, an available bandwidth of a computer network connection shared by a communication session of each media source of the plurality of media sources;
• communicating, by the network appliance, a common perception index value and an adjustment to the common perception index value, to each of the plurality of media sources;
• determining, by the network appliance, a required accumulated bandwidth for transmitting via the computer network connection, the encoded media from each media source of the plurality of media sources;
• and
• adjusting, by the network appliance, the common perception index value based on a comparison of the available bandwidth and the required accumulated bandwidth, wherein the common perception index value defines for each of the communication sessions, based on a pixel size of an associated image update, (i) an image encoding frame rate and a quantization level for generating an encoding of the associated image update, and (ii) a bandwidth for transmitting the encoding;
• and wherein, for each media source of the plurality of media sources, pixel sizes of successive image updates are sporadically inconsistent.