Forum Discussion
MS Teams Video quality is terrible
I am a MS fan for the most part, but you guys need to fix this Teams video quality issue. Our teams have been using it for weeks now and people are regularly getting blurry and poor audio / video quality. We have been pushing people to Teams for the collaboration, etc, but they are pushing back to use Zoom. Here is a video I put together showing this issue. Please MS fix this asap.
https://youtu.be/aW3U16OKTiA
[SOLVED]
I called with microsoft. The problems could be solved when you deleting the cache of Teams!
o Close Teams (dont forget the background process)
o Go to %appdata%\microsoft\teams
o Delete all files and folders here
o Start Teams again
The preview stays very bad quality, but when a call is made, the other end has "better" video. But it will be max 720P in teams.
43 Replies
jsquaredz I've discovered that my webcam (Microsoft LifeCam Studio) was the primary reason my video was bad. It turns out it was back focusing terribly (focused behind me by at least a foot or two). I know for some this is not the issue, but be sure your webcam is working right. Turns out there are quite a few people apparently having focus issues with Microsoft webcams. I discovered it by using the Windows 10 Camera app and doing some testing.
The way to test, if your camera isn't fixed focus, is to put your hand about 6 - 10 inches from the camera, wait for it to try to focus, move the hand back another six inches and repeat. Observe the focus process. No matter where, except far away, the focus perfect for a moment but would lock in position out of focus.
Since webcams are in short supply I used a Canon - VIXIA HF R800 with a USB HDMI capture adapter and my video is much better now.
- I use a Logitech brio 4K camera. I’ve actually tried to push the video directly and through OBS and I can tell the quality from the camera is perfect like the zoom video shows.
- it is now November 2021 .. still same issue .. how is that!
- Yes it’s still pretty much the same. I think I’ve figured out that no matter if you have one or two people on teams uses a fixed low definition stream. Each user that is added has the same as stream. Once you have a few people on and their videos are tiny you can’t notice anymore.
Zoom starts off giving a high definition stream if you’re only talking to one or two people. As you add additional people and the video windows gets smaller zoom will reduce the quality of each stream which you can’t tell because it’s more pixels than the little box has anyway.
When I did an experiment I noticed that zoom bandwidth usage stayed about the same at 1.5 or 2 mbits total no matter how many people had on.
Teams on the other Hand started with a 250k stream with just me, the. Went to 500 total once the other person joined and 750 with the third etc. by the time you have four people on and are using a megabit the individual video windows are small enough that it appears the quality improved.
Bottom line is that Microsoft should have an HD stream and adaptive streaming that only adjusts lower(per stream) as the video window size is reduced.jsquaredz Hm, so no solution yet. That's pretty bad. And just to be sure: my camera quality is, such as yours, also perfect when using Zoom or Windows 10 Camera app. So this definitely is a MS Teams issue. But that was already clear, I guess.
I've read a lot about this issue. But have I missed something? Are there any settings in MS Teams or the Office or Teams Control Center that I may have overlooked?
- Yes it’s still pretty much the same. I think I’ve figured out that no matter if you have one or two people on teams uses a fixed low definition stream. Each user that is added has the same as stream. Once you have a few people on and their videos are tiny you can’t notice anymore.
Zoom starts of giving a high definition stream if your only talking to one or two people. As you add additional people and the video windows gets smaller zoom will reduce the quality of each stream which you can’t tell because it’s more pixels than the little box has anyway.
When I did an experiment I noticed that zoom bandwidth usage stayed about the same at 1.5 or 2 mbits total no matter how many people had on.
Teams on the other Hand started with a 250k stream with just me, the. Went to 500 total once the other person joined and 750 with the third etc. by the time you have four people on and are using a megabit the individual video windows are small enough that it appears the quality improved.
Bottom line is that Microsoft should have an HD stream and adaptive streaming that only adjusts lower(per stream) as the video window size is reduced.
- One of our MVPs just posted a blog about this yesterday: https://office365itpros.com/2020/07/22/teams-memory-management/
jsquaredz Just a heads up that besides your own configuration this is most likely due to the "Awareness of Microsoft 365 temporary feature adjustments" due to the extensive increase of cloud services. For Teams one of the adjustments involved 'reduced video resolution'. I haven't noticed an update regarding this since the previous message (MC207439) so as far as I know it's still reduced.
ChristianBergstrom I have been urging my dept to switch to teams. In my demo, the video was lagging. What a terrible first intro for them, as Zoom works flawlessly.
jsquaredz In a test late last night with backgrounds if I was the only one in the meeting my onscreen image was lower res and background was super low res but as soon as I connected another user a few seconds later the image for both remote and myself was much sharper, I'd say probably 1080p.
Be sure someone hasn't played with meeting policies too. When I looked into it my user, probably me in testing and got side tracked, was set to a lower bandwidth policy.
- Teams has been good until 2 weeks ago. The video is very blurry after the background effect is enabled
- Yeah, they need to spin up some more servers over at the Data Center and open up the video quality valves.
