It is truly sad how bad Zoom / Google Meet / Teams are when it comes to video quality.

I look at my local source vs the recording, and I am baffled.

After a decade of online meeting software, we still stream 480p quality it seems.

FaceTime has great quality. Unfortunately, as you age you start to hate the quality.

When I have a full team of people with 1080p webcams and a solid connection I can notice the quality. Most of the time not everyone fulfills those requirements and the orchestrator system has to make do

I mean you can easily create your own fully meshed P2P group video chat in your browser just using a little bit of JS that would support everyone running 4k, but it will fail the moment you get more than 3-8 people as each persons video stream is eating 25mbps for every side of a peer connection (or 2x per edge in the graph.)

A huge part of group video chat is still "hacks" like downsampling non-speaking participants so the bandwidth doesn't kill the connection.

As we get fatter pipes and faster GPUs streaming will become better.

edit: I mean... I could see a future where realtime video feeds never get super high resolution and everything effectively becomes a relatively seemless AI recreation where only facial movement data is transmitted similar to how game engines work now.

I'm not asking for 4k.

I am asking for good 720p... With how static cam footage is it would be less than 8mbps probably.