Forum Discussion
Improve quality of a Teams screen-shared video?
Dear all,
In our company we're using Microsoft Teams with roughly 70 employees.
Relatively frequently, we need to share promotional (marketing) videos to external parties or clients. To do this, we invite contacts of these companies to a video call meeting in Teams.
During such a call, we briefly present a presentation and then show videos that we have produced.
Now, the challenge I'm trying to solve for our company is how to improve how our audience sees the video that we are playing on our computer, and then display to them through screen sharing.
The resolution is OK, but the framerate is rather appalling (roughly 2-3 fps on their side, while it is 40fps on our side). This diminishes the whole experience. We cannot pre-share the video file with them because of rights.
We're using only Windows 10 systems.
What I have tried:
- Check connection speed on both sides. Did an experiment with 2 private owned systems, both on 1Gbit internet (~100 MB/s up and downstream). Same issue. This rules out any bandwidth issues on either side since I suspect that ~1 Gbit on either side should be sufficient for Teams screen sharing.
- Disabling webcam on our side at the same time screen sharing is on. This slightly improves the frame rate to 4 / 5 fps.
- As IT specialist, I have checked Task Manager's networking tab. I noticed that at maximum, Teams will pump out 1 MBit/s (128 KB/s). Could the issue be here? Is this throttled by the application itself? Any way to improve?
Furthermore, I wonder why webcam streaming can be fluid at say 25-30 fps (perhaps with lower resolution) while screen sharing seems stuck at 3-4 FPS.
Happy to hear your thoughts. Also other (out of the box) ideas are welcome, as long as we can remotely show videos to our clients.
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...
- Our users have the same complaint. We have video embedded in powerpoint slides, and tried uploading them to onedrive or Teams and driving from there, but everyone's video plays at a different time according to their own connection.
- we've used this same solution, and it has worked for us... I wish we could do the same thing with just the original video files 😕
- Share pre-recorded videos using a virtual webcam, so that the video is encoded like the users video camera instead of screen sharing. You can also use PowerPoint Live and embed the video into the PPT. PowerPoint Live works much better than screen sharing from the users desktop.
We use NDI to playback video, and use the NDI virtual webcam as the presenters camera. Brounzer Our experience has been so long as sharing system audio, that frame rate would be acceptable (15 - 20 fps) however today it is back to 2 or 3 fps. This used to be the case and Teams was not satisfactory for desktop video sharing, however Zoom was great. I've checked Zoom today and it is still great - is Microsoft doing something with Teams this week that would explain the sudden change in performance??
- Same experience here. As far as we can tell, everything else is equal (same PC, same network, etc). It's just that in the past week, video framerates when screen sharing have slowed to a crawl.
Hey Everyone, I had this same issue with the frame rate through the Teams App... I have just learned that if you utilize Teams through your web browser and the recipient uses Teams through their web browser the issue seems to go away. The app still needs work when sharing video playback, we actually lost a very large project opportunity because of this annoying issue. Try using Teams though your web browser while Microsoft takes their time trying to fix this issue with the app.
- Thanks for the update. Do you have a recommendation which browser works best? And are you missing any features compared to the desktop app?
- Do you still have this problem? I have a platform that utilises screen sharing with teams, it's very frustrating that I need to tell my customers to use the web version.
- Have you tried to uplad the videos to Stream and just share your screen playing the videos in Stream?
That is not working, stream has a huge delay. which means the video shown is often 40-60seconds behind what the speakers are seeing
Hey. We had a similar problem in Teams video meeting of 4 people for one of our guest. Though it was not with the framerate. The guest experienced bitrate issues I guess as for them the frame quality deteriorated from HD at many instances in the meeting based on what they described it to be.
Brounzer We have a similar issue. Our customer wants to perform new employee training using Teams Meetings to multiple regional sites. All the desktop specs in Task Manager seem to be OK (although the network bandwidth seems to flatline at 2 Mbps), and the Call Analytics in Teams show good quality connections. The customer is willing to pay for better hardware, but I can't seem to determine which part of the system is the bottleneck. I have had some success in reducing the resolution of the videos down to about 360p, but something doesn't feel right about that solution. It seems like we just need a little more insight into how Teams is handling the shared desktop apps.
Any news or solutions regarding this issue?
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...
- We've had a similar issue almost the other way around. Staff set up a meeting and record the screen share. Their output file that records to stream is only 10fps. I'd suggest that teams is limiting frame rate to guarantee connectivity.
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
- on laptop running windows 10,using mobile hotspot ,i get 8-15 fps on the reciving end with more than 70 people in the meeting
