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Comment by kcb | Hacker News Reader

Webcams are good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing and calls. In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not being in razor sharp detail on calls anyway.

Anyway this is the one I've been using. https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Webcam-Built-Stereo-Micropho... I like the integrated shutter better than the cover thing for the c920.

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+1 to that. I don't want to be in ultra HD in meetings. I mean, I also don't want to look like a character from a 90s CD-ROM game -- but that's a matter of bandwidth, not the camera.

In a way, 720p or below is a non-vain version of applying a filter, smoothing imperfections away.

Don't think this is actually true. We stream high definition video regularly nowadays. It's not a question of resolution, but of other qualities of the recording, the way differences in lighting is handled etc. Those imperfections are not smoothed away by compression.

To your point, I've seen some modern webcams accentuate extremely minor facial blemishes to the point where observers actually notice it and call it out, concerned that the person is sick or has had some sort shaving incident. I would think compression would make that even worse.

Mine does this. It makes me look drunk. People who met me in real life after lockdown were surprised I looked normal. I keep meaning to find some software that will turn the red down.

Try different lighting. Less warm white.

I care a lot less about resolution, but more about the actual image quality. Noise, color/white balance, detail, etc.

I don’t know how much time you spend on zoom calls but if both sides have genuinely good connections and you have a good camera and lighting, you can get fairly high def video across. And it makes a big difference, especially if you’re 1-1 and want to make a proper connection and read their expression.

I don't know how up to date this is, but there are limitations in both Zoom and Microsoft Teams in regards to video quality:

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207347086-Using-Gr...

You also need to have a higher plan to get 1080p video in some cases.

For the Zoom Pro account, you even have to contact Zoom Support to get them to enable 720p!

In a small call with 2-4 participants, sure.

But a work meeting with 6 people and a presentation? Every participant's video will be shrunk to the size of a postage stamp.

Depends on so many factors. How large is the screen? Is use of multiple screens enabled in zoom? Is speaker mode enabled?

Big meetings are the most worthless meetings anyway. It's 1:1s or three person meetings I find most productive, and where I care more about video quality.

> good enough for their purpose which is video conferencing

As a hard of hearing person, the main reason I'd bother to video conference is so I can see a person's lips to understand them better. The vast majority of practical set-ups do not presently make that possible. Some are so bad with the compression and framerate that sign language gets substantially garbled, too.

You probably know of this already, but in some software you can have speech to text live subtitles. I hate to advertise for Google but their Meet thing is the only one where I know this exists. The quality is slightly worse than their YouTube auto-subtitles (and even those are worse than my own hearing as a non-native listener), though perhaps that's because the input is also worse and it needs to be realtime? Not sure, but if you're having trouble understanding, getting 80% as text plus your own hearing and lip reading might be a big aid.

Microsoft Teams has live transcription feature too unfortunately if you don't speak in a native or near native US or UK English accent the results are quite bad.

I'd remove 'UK English' from that at least - at my previous company we joked about how completely unusable it was: almost everything was transcribed as 'Samoa'; it also liked 'certainly Christmas' and other odd phrases that certainly weren't being said.

That was actually an assumption on my part. Most people in our team are not native English speakers and it does a really bad job. Transcription text at the end of the meeting is pure comedy.

I'd love to hear a sample of a British accent where everything sounds like Samoa or similar! :D

I guess it is meant to be 'somewhere'.

There honestly didn't seem to be any such rhyme or reason to it - it was way too frequent. Often replacing a whole sentence. (Not that those either side would be recognisable enough to see that it was a sentence between them being replaced.)

The first time we saw it there was a good lot of 'what the hell is this' before we even realised it was supposed to be a transcript, it was that bad. I'm not talking about just the odd bits replaced with weird words/phrases - the whole thing would be utter nonsense.

(And this was in Cambridge, not to say everybody was local (I'm not), but still, predominantly 'standard' not-straying-too-far-from-RP accents, it's not like it was some difficult niche regional accent & dialect that it couldn't understand.)

We use it as a joke internally. It requires plain English, spoken slowly with a generic US accent (even fake) - anything else is proper bad. To be fair it has improved nontrivially, though.

As others have mentioned, Microsoft Teams also has an auto-generated Live Captions feature. It supports creating live captions for a number of spoken languages [0].

Zoom also has the feature, they call it Live Transcription [1].

While such features can be helpful, using them is rather different than lip reading, particularly while you're in a conversation.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-live-captions...

[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/207279736-Managing...

Microsoft Teams also does this.

Zoom has this also.

> In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like 360p low bitrate. I personally prefer not being in razor sharp detail on calls anyway.

Good color is kind of important though and usually not affected by bandwidth.

Full ack on that last part. I got a new laptop from my employer a few months ago and the angle is so wide, I have trouble not having something like a drying rack or other unprofessional stuff in the background. It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome feature.

That's not to say that I don't see the use-case for good quality. The "360p ought to be enough for anyone", as you say, really is fairly crappy, and if you're doing some announcement for an audience you care about, where you're in full view on everyone's screen, it would be nice to have a bit better quality than that.

(Or for science/hacking: I use my phone camera for a ton of things from capturing the night sky to the ~1000 fps slow motion feature. If webcams had similar "gimmicks", I'd probably make use of it, also because webcams are connected to a machine where coding is a lot easier than on a phone, so I can more easily do something meaningful with the image stream. But I realize I'm the outlier here.)

> It's still on my to-do list to look for a way to crop the image, and manual quality control would also be a welcome feature.

OBS with virtual camera. Add the camera as a source, scale and crop to your heart's content, click 'start virtual camera', then launch your videoconferencing software and choose the virtual camera.

Thanks! I already glanced at my options and this one seemed like overkill, but yeah it does sound like the go-to solution that everyone uses. Will be installing this some time soon, thanks for confirming this is the way to go :) (Also to the sibling comment)

On linux you may be able to set it up with fmpeg and v4l2loopback (create a v4l2loopback device and have ffmpeg grab your input, crop it, and output to that device). Maybe less overkill, but probably more involved to set up though so OBS is probably your best choice unless it is really too heavy.

You could use OBS studio to crop the image. It takes your webcam as an input and creates a virtual cam that works with every conferencing software I've tried. (It can also use your phone camera with the aid of the DroidCam OBS app.)

> "In the end your video is likely going to be encoded in like 360p low bitrate"

But a low-bitrate video that uses better-quality source pixels can still look much better than if used bad pixels as input.

specially if the "bad" pixels are noise that consume most of the bitrate without carrying information.

Yeah I kind of agree. We're years away from when most people's videoconferencing quality is close to C920 quality. Audio is much more important. The C920's is pretty crap. You can easily buy better mics, but unfortunately most people just don't care about the quality of their own output.

I think part of the problem is that it's quite difficult to know your audio/video sounds/looks crap to other people. For most users they won't have a clue until someone says "I can't hear you" lots of times.

Zoom doesn't even have a way to test your connection.

Zoom is the test of connection itself. The way it handles choppy link with slowdown then speedup technique to mask the issues, balances audio over video priority etc, just amazes me. One of the best videoconf software I used since 1990s which works in really shitty conditions (remote LTE, HSDPA).

Yeah I agree the sped up audio technique is clever. But I don't know what you mean by "Zoom is the test of connection itself".

The only indication it gives you that people can't hear you is a "Your internet connection is unstable" warning and that doesn't really tell you much.

Well, Zoom dynamically adopts to whatever connection pipe you have, you get "Your internet connection is unstable" when the net is really really bad - several seconds pings and packet loses etc. If you see it too often then the test is failed :)

Audio is very important, but I have no idea what would make a good microphone, everyone seems to have a different opinion on what constitutes ‘great’.

You can just record yourself in Audacity. We're not talking recording studio grade here. It's pretty obvious what is good and what isn't.

But compression looks so much better when it has decent source material to work with. It's the crappy noisy stuff it screws up on because it views the noise as detail and tries to preserve it, at the expense of details you do actually care about.

This is why movies still look really good even at surprisingly low bitrates (well one of the reasons, the other is of course unlimited time and lots of budget for tuning the compression which realtime applications don't have)

Yep.. I don't want a camera so good that my colleagues can see a wild nose hair or any other normal human imperfections via web conferencing, lol

If you tweak some zoom settings you can get a slightly-less-shitty bitrate, and people constantly comment on the quality of my MILC-based setup (APS-C camera with a cheapo chinese prime f/1.2 lens). This is vs the $200-ish logitech external webcam that is standard issue at my company.

Agreed. I set up a really nice webcam by using a Mirrorless Full Frame camera and my wife refuses to use it when she sits at my desk. She doesn't want her coworkers to see her with that much detail and clarity.

By the way, just using a Sony or Panasonic mirrorless is fine, you don't need to buy a custom high-end webcam, and you can use those for taking pictures and videos when you're out on the weekend.

At the end of the day, you'll mostly end up as a glorified thumbnail in a small corner of a, let's be realistic, 1080p screen, next to a bunch of other people. No one in the call gains anything by watching each other, it doesn't matter. For this case, just get a good microphone (even a 30€ Behringer sounds much better than whatever it is most people use).

Another +1. I got a HP w100 480P 30 FPS for this purpose. It serves my purpose best which is interviews and screen shares with friends. I can be seen and recognized and save on bandwich.

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