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The webcam and video call market has stopped to improve like, 10 years ago. There's some exceptions, like the Brio, but they are worse and more expensive than a whole cheapo phone with 2 cameras. Overall we're mostly stuck with 1280x720 fixfoxus usb-2.0 crap. On the software side, things don't look better: UVC 1.5 finally does support hardware encode with bitrate control, but software support is scarce. Completely unsupported by Linux even. Don't get me started about free videoconference software and open, end-to-end encrypted systems. Am I missing something? Is this really that hard?

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> Don't get me started about free videoconference software and open, end-to-end encrypted systems. Am I missing something? Is this really that hard?

I feel your pain :( couple days ago someone posted this: https://jami.net

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755596

Home broadband has not improved much in the past 10 years. Home users simply couldn't stream a 720p video back then and most still can't as of today.

So there is no point in making higher resolution cameras, that won't run 5 frames per second.

Besides, high-end phones have very good cameras nowadays but they sell for a $1000 and upward. The typical webcam budget is rather in the $20-30 range. If you're willing to put hundred(s) in a webcam, like businesses and streamers, there are good options.

This doesn't appear to be accurate.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-...

Anecdotally, my local ISP has gone from everyone getting 10/1 to 100/5 in the base package in the last few years.

Upload bandwidth for 95% of homes in the US is the same as it was almost 20 years ago. It’s so bad it’s not even advertised. If you have access to fiber, then you’re very lucky in the US.

I would also say 5mbps upload is hardly an upgrade. A single FaceTime call uses a couple mbps, so it’s probably just enough for that, assuming everyone in the neighborhood isn’t uploading too, which they are nowadays.

Again, anecdotally, mine's gone from 1 Mbps upload to 30 in the last ~10 years or so. I don't have fiber, I've got Spectrum over the cable lines, in a small market with not much competition. (It's either Spectrum, or the local phone company's shitty DSL offering. There's one local fiber company, but only in a couple percent of households... including literally my neighbor, but not me.)

Specific data on upload speeds is harder to come by, but https://www.tomsguide.com/us/internet-speed-what-you-need,ne... says "According to Ookla, the average U.S. broadband download speed is 96 Mbps and average upload speeds are now at 33Mbps."

I can easily tell which of one of my family has fiber internet versus not fiber internet just by the consistency and quality of our FaceTime calls. Even between the US and England, the fiber to fiber connections are far more high quality and stable than cable and other types.

The ISPs can claim whatever numbers they want, but the real test is what it feels like when you use it.

They say 95% of statistics people quote are made up (including mine here).

So to quote a source, that is not my brain: from 2017 to 2018 upload speeds went up 22%

https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-f...

Non fiber upload speed is a farce. I assume it’s just something like 20mbps shared in a neighborhood of 50 or 100 homes, and the ISP lets it burst to 10mbps or something for a couple minutes and then throttles you down again.

There’s a reason it’s never advertised by cable ISPs.

The weak link is the copper cable going to the home. It's only possible to transport about 20 Mbps usable within a mile. It's split about 90% up 10% down because download is more useful for homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.992.5

Anything on the ISP network is most likely fiber (or Ethernet within one building), so symmetric both ways.

Yes, and the existing cable monopolies in the US would like it to stay that way, so they can continue to collect rent on their coaxial cable wires from decades ago.

That’s why they fight municipal fiber installation in court. If they didn’t do this, they wouldn’t be so evil, and also why fiber internet needs to be a utility, like electricity, water, gas, and sewage.

Also, since the media companies are also the owners of the wire in the case or Comcast, they can prioritize their traffic and de prioritize competitor’s traffic.

I'm lucky here. Nearly 1000mbps each way on my FIOS; and it's very consistent. I realize this is the 1% of internet in the US. But I would enjoy being able to send 4k video over Zoom.

There's another bandwidth limitation at play - public wi-fi in airports, hotels, and even conference centers is atrocious by default. The best bet for improving video calling resolution in the US appears to be hardware h.265 encoders because we're making such slow progress aggregately in Internet upload bandwidth.

Really is it that bad? I'm in third world India and get 200Mbps up and down at about $20/month.

Yes. The US is weirdly behind in a variety of things it got into early, but let stagnate. Until fairly recently, text messaging cost $0.10/message, for inbound and outbound. We only just got chips on our credit cards in the last few years. Broadband over 10-15 megabits is in a similar boat - only recently has it started to catch up with the rest of the world, and there's a lot left to go, especially in rural areas .

> Until fairly recently, text messaging cost $0.10/message

Define "fairly recently". I haven't paid per-text in over a decade.

Average is meaningless. Either you have broadband and you're physically capped at 1 Mbps upload, or you have fiber and it's -roughly- unlimited.

The average of 9 households having broadband and 1 having gigabit fiber may be 100 Mbps theoretically, but practically that's 9 people who can't use a HD webcam.

> Either you have broadband and you're physically capped at 1 Mbps upload, or you have fiber and it's -roughly- unlimited.

This is... not the case?

Which part do you need more explanations about? I find modulation a fascinating topic.

Broadband ADSL has a total usable bandwidth around 20/1 Mbps due to how it works, that goes down significantly as a home is further from the phone center. Many homes won't get any better than 5/0.5 as they're kilometers away.

A single fiber can do a Tbps both ways. The difference is night and day.

> Which part do you not understand?

The part that ignores the existence of cable internet? Or the fact that plenty of people are on cell phones for their broadband usage?

The available options are more than "DSL, fiber, or nothing".

Also anecdotal, but I had less than 3 up and down about 11 years ago. 10 years ago it was 3 symmetric. Now its 100 symmetric, and was (briefly) 1gb symmetric with another provider last year.

Its definitely improving on average.

Not sure where you're living but that's not true. Home broadband has gotten a lot better over the last 10 years here in the UK. I don't know anyone (admittedly I don't know many in the countryside) who can't stream at 1080p. Even 4K Netflix is often fine.

He's referring to upload, not download, since that is the relevant metric when talking about using a webcam.

Yes about upload, but I want to say as well that Netflix is a special subject anyway.

A 1080p video on Netflix today has lower quality (bitrate) than a 720p video on Youtube 5 years ago. The only reason Netflix HD works for so many people is because Netflix has lowered the standard of what was considered HD.

The video on YouTube five years ago was encoded with a far less effective codec. H265 uses half the bandwidth of H264 for the same quality of video, for example; raw bitrate isn't a useful indicator of quality if the codecs differ.

Bitrate is a useful indicator. It's the amount of information that is directly linked to maximum quality, there are bounds on what can be compressed by how much.

Fact is, x265 can do 25-33% smaller size than x264 for equivalent visual quality. The higher gain at higher resolutions (2k, 4k) that were not well supported by older codecs anyway. You can refer to Netflix own papers on that.

Services doing half the bandwidth have reduced quality. The improvement in codec can only explain half the reduction, the other half is grossly lowering quality (to reduce costs and work with mediocre home connections). That's not necessarily bad for customers, better have a pseudo HD stream than no stream.

That still depends on where you are. Don't assume that the rest of the world is like America.

Here in South Korea, 100M symmetric is the bare minimum. For just a few dollars more, you can upgrade to an "up to 500M" plan that usually provides something like 300M symmetric. Often, upload speeds are even faster than download speeds because there's less congestion in that direction.

> Don't assume that the rest of the world is like America.

Where was the US mentioned, and how is this relevant?

I'm trying to point out that, in some countries, it doesn't even occur to people that their upload speeds might be significantly different from their download speeds. The very fact that the parent worries about such a difference is an artifact of where they're from.

I picked the US as a worst-case example because it has some of the most asymmetric broadband plans in the developed world. How on Earth does an ISP get away with selling something like 100/5?

Really?

I've got 500/500 MBit/s at home. 10 years ago I had about 30, but even that is more than sufficient to stream high quality video.

And this is not a "first-world" country even.

Agreed; I tried to find a non-wide angle webcam and failed. All of them seem to have a tiny, old sensor and a crappy plastic wide-angle lens.

Now I'm using my Nikon d800 with 85mm lens to get a video feed that doesn't suck and pick up my entire messy home office - but it's an overkill, messy, and reduces lifespan of my camera. Boo all around!

Some of the first consumer level usb 3.0 webcams capable of 60 fps only came out a few years ago. Before that it was impossible to get such framerate on a webcam because usb 2.0 did not have enough bandwidth.

Personally I’d put a higher frame rate near the bottom of my wish list for a better webcam. First, improve low light performance, autofocus, white balance, dynamic range, and autoexposure. Once those are good then we can talk about frame rate and resolution....

HDR in particular is a feature sorely missing from webcams, where it seems everybody is being darkened by a nearby window.

The Meeting Owl Pro appears to be an exception to the innovation complacency.

https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl

Ah yes, the Owl Pro. The thing that we wasted 5-10 minutes every meeting on to get it to work.

What specifically didn’t work?

We have a couple and they're good. Not great, but good. But they're a nice midpoint between laptop cams and mics (crummy), $100 jabra gear which is not much better, and $10k zoom rooms. We have them in all our conference rooms.

$1k webcam?

I don't think it's hard so much as it's niche. I bet the vast majority of people use their phones or tablets for video calls.

Partly because webcams are so incredibly terrible. (And laptop cameras even on decent laptops often are worse than tablet or phone front-facing cameras.)

This is a thing that definitely could and should be improved.

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