Status-Q

Having been a big fan of Zoom and extolled its virtues in the past, I thought it only fair to share a current criticism. (I’m talking about the videoconferencing app, of course. I’m an even bigger fan of the other Zoom and have relied on their products for years… definitely recommended!)

Anyway, back to video calls. I was playing recently with virtual cameras in OBS so I could do fun things like adding lower-thirds titles to my video stream…

or blending multiple video streams into one….

and my friend Nicholas commented that it was very clever, but any text was not actually that readable. At which point we delved into the Preferences > Statistics menu on the Zoom app and discovered that the video resolution was only 640×360; definitely lower than it used to be.

Now, this is perfectly fine for having a conversation with somebody, so for the vast majority of Zoom use, it’s not an issue. And if you turn on screen-sharing, your screen image is sent at a much higher resolution, so that’s fine too.

But it is an issue for some of my colleagues who like using pointing cameras at whiteboards or documents while giving remote lectures, or even if you’re just trying to hold something up to your camera for the person at the other end to read.

If you search online, you can find various references to ‘Enabling HD’, or to different resolutions being possible for Business or Education accounts, but as far as I can gather, these are all currently disabled or have no effect. I think Zoom may be restricting things to manage the load on their servers, which makes me wonder how much actually goes through their servers? At least for a 2-person call, like the one Nicholas and I were in, it really ought to be peer-to-peer. (Like Skype used to be in the early days before Microsoft bought and ruined it.) Still, to be fair, even the otherwise-abominable Teams does do a much better job at the moment when it comes to resolution.

Well, this may resolve itself in Zoom, but bizarrely, in the meantime, if you care about resolution of your camera more than you care about framerate or latency, the solution is probably to show it on your local display in high resolution, and then share your screen.