A subscription to remove a forced watermark? No thank you.
I wish this to be "Sherlock"d by Apple, hopefully on the next OS release.
Why webcams aren’t good enough
51–60 of 297 posts
Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
#52Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
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Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
#54When I wasn't able to purchase a webcam (for a reasonable amount) at the beginning of the lockdown, I started using my Pixel 3 with DroidCam[1]. My video quality is consistently the best in all the meetings I'm in, so I can really recommend using your phone. I stream the video over adb myself, to make sure I don't drain the battery too much and to keep everything wired. [1]: https://www.dev47apps.com/
Couldn't you also just join the meeting from your phone? Or once from your phone and once from your PC?
Yes, this is what I used to to, but it has drawbacks.
If you only join from your phone, you can't really see other participants (unless you use your front cam, and in that case your screen is obviously still very small) and you won't be able to screen share.
If you join on both, you will be in the meeting twice (which can look weird to other people). In my case, I want to use a dedicated microphone, not my phone's microphone that might be blocked by the arm that is holding it in place. That results in a weird AV delay since the audio is coming from a different user in the call (and it means your video is not highlighted when you speak).
In short - my current setup hides the implementation details and makes it all work transparently without bothering people I'm in a call with.
Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
#55Good enough for what ? Most of the sample pics look absolutely fine to me for every day use, i.e., online meetings.
Agree, It's all wonderful comparing quality until you jump on a call and the stream gets throttled to 480p.
One step at a time. First let's get the webcam quality looking good locally, then we can solve the network problem.
Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
#56Different article from a month ago “Why can’t you buy a good web cam?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504771 Lots of points. Big one being that the market is bifurcated into: 1. People who just want the minimum as cheap as possible. 2. People willing to pay enough to buy a mirrorless photo camera and plug it in as a web cam when they need it.
I see this pattern everywhere - the market bifurcating into a) race-to-the-bottom garbage products that are barely crossing the legal threshold of fit for purpose, and are essentially a huge waste of natural resources, and b) quality goods sold to specialists or companies, usually severely overpriced (to cover low volume of sales, and/or just because the market will bear it). Does it have a name in economics? Are the…
This is called market segmentation, and is for some reason considered a good thing. Actually it's the means to extract maximum cash out of customers who want anything more than the bare minimum.
Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shouldn't the rise of remote work change this?
It hasn't done so so far.
Yes, that's what's strange to me.
Either laptop manufacturers are missing a trick that would help them compete, or people don't really care about picture quality in remote video calls.
Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even Apple would seemingly rather shave 50 cents off the BOM by speccing a 720p Facetime camera in their $3000 Macbook Pros The reason I've heard is that the macbook display assembly simply doesn't have the depth to house a decent camera. The camera bump in phones exists for a reason - and phones are already way fatter than macbook displays. I have no idea if thats true though.
I also thought about this but then look at the iPad and iPhone Facetime cameras. They offer much better image quality than Macbook webcams. There are a few ways to offer "rear camera" quality on Macbooks, like having a little bump sticking out from the back. I don't think that's what people are asking for though. They just want a webcam that's as good as the webcam in their phone. Also this doesn't answer the questio…
Those devices are significantly thicker that a MacBook display.
I could imagine a bump towards the front that would sink into the body when closed, but doing it in a way that looks and feels good also seems rather hard - but also harder to avoid should they want to implement things such as face id.
Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
#59But given that you have a 4K RED setup in your bedroom with a studio microphone, what technology actually preserves most of the quality over the video call? Let's say both participants have fibre connections and located in the same city.
Plain old RTMP stream with h.265 inside probably. The problem is that nobody uses this for streaming because h.265 encoding is expensive even for hardware encoders in GPU. So to satisfice, use h.264 at good bitrate. Over 80 Mbit should be fine ;)
Re: Why webcams aren’t good enough
#60It's assholes selling crap to idiots.