Saturday, May 7, 2011

Video Quality Adjustments

There are 2 ways to adjust the video settings:

1.  The sender can change the resolution and frame rate of his/her webcam.  If the default of 320x240/6fps is too low for you, set it to 640x480/10fps, and you'd see a big difference.  It will take more network bandwidth though.

2.  Both the sender and the receiver can adjust the video compression quality via buttons 5 & 6.  These buttons adjust whichever video currently in the main (large) window (object-oriented concept):
  a)  When your webcam is in the main window, the adjustments allow you to adjust the video quality of your webcam which is sent to other people.  You cannot see this reflected on the window, because you are seeing the unencoded video from the webcam, but the receiver will notice the difference.
  b)  When someone else's video is in your main window, the adjustments allow you to change their video quality.  That is, your app is sending a request to their app to change their webcam quality.  Why do this? Because the higher quality, the higher bandwidth usage.  If you have 4 video streams coming in, you may want only the main window to have high quality, and the others in lower quality.  You can swap any video to the main window when desired, and readjust its quality.

3 comments:

  1. This is a great tool. When using the tool, one is required to adjust some video settings (such as the above), setting up Peer-to-Peer connection, etc. Easy to do...but for technophobes (like my parents), this is too much overhead for them. Is there a way I can setup all these parameters for them in the URL link so that they just have to click the link to have it all setup for them. Eg. right now, you can enter

    http://www.reelportal.com/?name=Parents,room=chat,key=password

    and the initial log in page is filled in with name, room and key automatically. Can this idea be extended to include video adjustments, P2P settings on the URL line so the technophobes can click the link and have all the desired parms setup for them?

    ReplyDelete
  2. See my reply here:

    http://forums.2295983.n4.nabble.com/automated-link-to-room-with-credentials-td3716621.html#a4203643

    ReplyDelete
  3. how do i add people

    ReplyDelete