Web Conferencing Video Quality: 1. Meeting Quality Profiles
Did you know that your meeting video quality is dependent on many factors?
One side of it is the hardware you’re using, from the webcam to the microphone. Lighting and specifically the brightness of the room also makes a huge difference in your image quality. Remember, a webcam is not a 1000$ DSLR camera.
On the other hand, the quality of your internet connection is also extremely important, if not more important than the hardware aspect in some cases. An unstable internet connection will immediately invalidate the price tag of your video streaming setup.
Meeting Quality Profiles
As a host, 3CX VC (Video Conferencing) allows you to set 3 profiles for your meeting. From Low (800 kbps) to Balanced (1800 kbps) and Quality (3500 kbps) mode. Each profile defines how much each participant should send into the meeting.
Download
The chart below shows how much download bandwidth is required by each meeting user. You’ll notice that across all profiles, the increase in bandwidth requirements isn’t linear e.g you don’t need as much download bandwidth as you’d think if there are more and more users piling into a meeting. The reason behind how this works will become apparent in the next chart that shows upload bandwidth requirements and the correlation between download and upload bandwidth increases.
Upload
The chart below shows how much upload bandwidth is required by each meeting user. You’ll notice that the more users, the less upload bandwidth each user needs to have. You might think this is strange, but there’s some good reasoning behind this.
The more users with video connected, the more video panes you’ll see in 3CX. The more video panes, the smaller they’ll be so they can fit on your screen. The smaller they are, the less detail you’ll be able to discern in video quality.
3CX takes advantage of this and rather than continuing to use too much bandwidth for a tiny video pane, it decreases bandwidth slightly. Basically the bigger your video pane, the more bandwidth you’ll use and vice versa.
Stay tuned for the next part of this blog post series, where we’ll cover latency!
