Increase video quality for screen sharing.

[MelbourneMarsden]

Am I alone in finding the video quality for screen sharing borderline unacceptable? It seems to cap out at 1080P with very strong compression at a low framerate. My company are all software developers with high end computers and gigabit internet connections yet we can't screen share a lot of the stuff we're doing in Teams due to the compression killing contrast between text elements and the low framerate making it difficult to follow.

For reference, the workstation I'm using is a Ryzen 9 3900X with 64GB of RAM and a RTX 2080Ti with fibre gigabit coming in right under the desk and my colleagues' setups are similar.

Can Microsoft enable a higher quality video mode to make Teams competitive with less convenient streaming software?

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@MelbourneMarsden 

Thanks for the feedback. You are right that the current limit is 1080p resolution as per Microsoft documentation. 

Prepare your organization's network for Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs

There has been calls for this online for a long time about going beyond 1080p - for example, to 4k. Microsoft restricted it for a while to 720p because of platform scaling, but I think we are at the point it needs to happen, especially as cameras like the Brio support it. 

I have raised a feedback for you here. I am sure there was one previously on Uservoice but this doesn't seem to have been moved over. I would recommend voting up and getting as many to do so to get it in front of the product team

Raise Teams Meeting Quality beyond 1080p (E.g., 4K) for better meeting experience and screen sharing...

Hope that answers your question

Best, Chris

[#3]

I think that there are a number of things that you might not be thinking about when sharing. The first being what size screen are you sharing from. The next being what size screen are you viewing on.
I use a 46 inch monitor at 4k resolution. I NEVER share my screen, because I know no one else can see it. I will share apps, but I generally work to make sure that the app takes less than a quarter of my screen so that others can see it.
There is a magnify option for the viewers so that they can enlarge it if needed.

[#4]

@Ed Woodrick Yeah, it's a 34" 3440x1440. I set it to 16:9 and zoom things in on my screen whenever I am sharing though. Honestly the 1080P cap on resolution is fine, it's more that the whole thing doesn't seem to want to go over ~4mbps of bandwidth which results in very low framerate and bad video compression.

[#5]

Thank you Chris. We're very happy with the Office365 etc environment in general and I understand the service needs to scale well to the lowest common denominator, but it seems harmless to expand the upper range if everyone in the call can handle it.

[#6]

@MelbourneMarsden 

Zoom fully supports screen sharing in 4K monitors

[#7]

it's a good idea for personal
but if it's 4K, should we concern the auto adjust may not good enough?
still think it's better to have a function&policy&setting for Company to control it

[#8]

If sharing between two 4K monitors (each user has a 4K monitor) with high band width (very common these days), why does Teams lower the resolution to 1920 x 1080? Everything appears blurry and hard to read. Try it with Zoom and you will see how much better it looks.

@AnqB0VVRJMzsO6zV 

[#9]

I mean I agree to have this option under control, and I can see you are in a company with excellent hardware, but at least for most giant company I know, still not have/need that.

it's about management, stable, cost/benefit, it sounds cold blood but that how we run a company
it sounds more useful for CAD/PS/MTR than normal app(office, browser, sap, etc.) , which make it should be undercontrol,
I'm afraid 4K and related network bandwidth still not the majority for apps, people needs.
about zoom, I will not judge

[#10]

Hello,

The sharing quality can also drop depending on your machine screen connection. For instance, I've just changed my screen connection (from VGA to mini Displayport) and now screen sharing is awfull.

I've found a solution: disabling hardware acceleration in Teams, then restarted it, and now my PC is slower, but I've got a decent screen sharing quality (at least it matches 1080p without removing pixels).

So bandwidth is important, but you can check removing HW acceleration and make a try :)

[#11]

NO! YOU ARE NOT ALONE!
I'm working also for a huge software company and most of us have screens with a higher resolution (higher than 1080p) And doing a longer screen sharing session with Microsoft Teams is really a pain! The shared screen is so blurry. Compared to Zoom the screen sharing experience of Microsoft Teams is simply horrible. For me it is unbelievable that not more Microsoft Teams users are complaining about that.

[#12]

We are experiencing this as well, I dislike having to keep using Zoom

[#13]

sadly same for me.. as a software developer it's a pain sharing screen with 1080p, when all of us has atleast a 2k screen. I formyself have a 34" 3440x1440 and my colleague a 4k screen.
When he shares his fullscreen scripts.. i can't read anything.. only getting artifacts.. even with only 2 people, we mostly only get 720p and we both have a gigabit connection.. this makes teams not very fun to use.

[#14]

I like Discord's solution: Tell it to optimize your screen share for text legibility and you get high-quality full-resolution captures at a low framerate to keep bandwidth and resource usage down.  Great for documents and mostly-static app windows.

[#15]

@MelbourneMarsden 

My whole team has dual 27" 4k monitors, which are great for showing a lot of the screen and multitasking. Unfortunately MS Teams is our company standard solution, and being a financial institution we cannot install other options, even though we are in IT.
When sharing we have to change resolution on one monitor to 1920x1080, which makes everything huge for us, but legible on the share. If we share at native resolution, nobody can see what we are sharing. Even when they zoom in it's just all blurry. It would be really nice to share in some higher resolution so we can stop going through these hoops to use MS Teams. 

[#16]

If platform scaling is such a huge problem, then stop trying to get everything hosted in the cloud. Give the companies the option to have a MS Teams appliance local on their gigabit network. Then let them share 4k all they want, and scale out those appliances as needed.
There are times when something local on the network is better, there are times when something external hosted locally (Edge vs Cloud computing) is better.
We should not all be limited because some people don't need 4k.

[#17]

Thanks very much!

If you could leave your feedback on the current feedback idea which corresponds to the old one on Uservoice that would be awesome

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/d412260c-a669-ec11-a819-000d3a058885

Alternatively, please feel free to open alternative feedbacks with the ideas you have.

All the best! Chris