> What I have been trying a lot is Webex teleconferencing for my job. Those
> all work great, including voice and slideshows, but seem to crash miserably
> (including a loss of sound) if even a single attendant puts up live webcam
> video. Very large conferences that disallow that work fine. We've set up
> test Webex conferences at home, and again sharing a webcam kills it. I
> suppose this could be some specific Webex problem, but I've been imagining
> it's a throughput problem. I have no problem playing online videos, but
> maybe they use smarter compression.
The network bandwidth shouldn't be the issue: the video stream can
fairly easily adapt to whichever bandwidth is available.
It seems much more likely that you're hitting a problem in the software
where the compression used is poorly supported by your client so it
doesn't make good use of your hardware and does all the decompression in
an inefficient manner, which your CPU is unable to do in real-time.
video-conferencing with webcams works just fine even with less than 1Mb/s
(i.e. 120kB/s).
Stefan
