Poor quality video

[Tomsdfgdsfgdfg]

I just ran a webinar with a pre-recorded video.  Many people have said that that the video quality was poor and they couldn't read the slides.  Why is this?

Thanks

[Ray_Harwood]

Welcome to the Zoom Community, @Tomsdfgdsfgdfg.

What method did you use to share the video? Did you use the Share Screen -> Advance tab -> Video box?  If so, what is the resolution of the video you were playing?

[Sharonb]

Hi could you help me out please..all my recordings pic quality were good but music was crackly..got music sorted but now the recording pic quality is terrible. It's distorted..it goes black and diff colours

[Tomsdfgdsfgdfg]

Hi Ray,

Yes that's right.  The video is 1080 and appears fine on many people's screens, including mine.  But my colleague and a few others have complained that it is blurry and I have seen that some of the text is unreadable.  Is this their local settings?

Thanks Tom

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, Tom,

Zoom does a good job trying to prioritize bandwidth usage, and if there are throughput issues along the path from the Zoom Data Center to the user’s device, it generally sacrifices video quality to ensure that audio quality can be maintained. That can include downscaling 1080 to 720, 640, and occasionally lower, though for screen sharing, it tries to avoid going lower; it will, however, scale down user camera video way down when viewing gallery mode.

The biggest bottleneck in bandwidth issues is using WiFi when there are many people using video (Zoom, YouTube, streaming TV, etc.).  Wired in directly to the router is always best. 

[Tomsdfgdsfgdfg]

Thank you Ray.

So would it be best to present live rather than through a recording?  Or would the result just be the same?  

And is this done at the Users end or at the Hosts end.  I am guessing at the users end as it only affected some people?

Many thanks

Tom

[Ray_Harwood]

Hey, Tom,

I’ve done it both ways – but I always prefer live presentation. Pre-recorded has the advantage of having strict time control – you can record and edit to have a presentation that fits in the time slot with room for live Q&A afterward. 

While I’m not 100% sure about all the technical details, I know that Zoom does what it needs to do at both the “feed” side (your mic and camera) and at the “receive” side (attendee displays and headsets) to assist as needed in getting the best possible experience. There’s an interesting back-and-forth between each side and the Zoom server which serves as sort of the “traffic cop”.  

When you’re in a meeting some day, bring up the Zoom Settings window and look at the Statistics tab. Here you can see Zoom making adjustments to audio, camera video, and screen share video “on the fly”.  Change between Speaker and Gallery View, Pin a user, start and stop screen sharing, etc and see exactly what Zoom does. It’s pretty interesting, actually.