Forum Discussion
Improve quality of a Teams screen-shared video?
erimo This issue was resolved. However, in order to resolve it, we needed to know how networking works in Teams. Here's a great video. https://youtu.be/vi3M7ZzF2NU It's about an hour long, but well worth it.
We put together a few test cases to verify the components of the system we control, specifically, the end points. We did a direct call between computers on the same LAN and attempted to stream the video. Fail. Since this case did not require any communication to the Microsoft Cloud (see the video), we were able to identify that the source computer just didn't have enough horsepower. After switching to a more powerful computer, we could stream video up to 720p without any performance issues. We brought the Microsoft Cloud into the loop by changing from a direct call to a meeting. There was virtually no difference in performance.
In further testing, we found anything less than an i5 would struggle. But as long as you have a decent machine and work within Microsoft's network guidelines, everything seems to run pretty well.
At least that is our experience...
Doing experiments in this today in the run-up to a live school prize-giving with Teams feed including prerecorded video.
If on the computer hosting the video playback (which in my setup is not the one running mic and camera) one resizes the shared video window (in this case Quicktime) - to make it smaller - the size of the clients frames do not resize but the resolution changes on the fly with a consequent improvement in framerate. So if you shrink the host window to, say, postcard size or even matchbox you can improve the framerate markedly - if you are prepared to compromise on res.
BTW these experiments were all on Mac, with desktop apps at each end, and iOS clients as well