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...
With the right third party plug in you can show videos in brilliant quality and in sync to your audience. Another possible way is to use PPT Live.Brounzer
- And which one would be the right third-party plug-in?
Same here. Few frames per second of sharing a 720p video, while the webcam (not sharing) gives an all right video.
I may try Steve's workaround and stream the video to a virtual cam. Although the disadvantage of this approach is that the other participants will need to change the view mode manually for the duration of the code so that my frame is full screen.
- -Download videos from sources with a ripper/conversion tool
-Upload videos into MS Steam
-Embed in PowerPoint via 'insert video, online video' option and use the MS Stream link to the video in Stream
NOTE: (you don't have to do the MS Stream bit if the source video is on YouTube, you can use the YouTube link)
-Make sure the PowerPoint file is not save locally but it being presented from a cloud volume like SharePoint Online or OneDrive and when presenting, present 'PowerPoint Live' not your screen or app/window sharing options
Why does this work?
It's online to many versus online to your machine and then your machine to attendee machine, plus, it excludes things like your local machine variables that can add frames like an outdated graphics adapter driver- This method works most of the time, with a caveat: if the end user is not logged into the company VPN, they can join the Teams meeting, but the content in the PPT will not be seen. It is blocked since they aren't logged into the tenant domain. Even when they are logged in, we see issues with this method occassionally. Looking forward to a better video sharing experience!
- 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. - 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
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.
- 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.
- Thanks for the update. Do you have a recommendation which browser works best? And are you missing any features compared to the desktop app?
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.
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
- 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.
