Breeze Article
Best Practices for Recording Breeze Meetings
Table of Contents
- Overview
- Best Practices for Screen Sharing
- Strategy 1: Use Alternatives to Screen Sharing
- Strategy 2: Optimize Your Local Setup
- Strategy 3: Optimize Room Bandwidth Settings
- Strategy 4: Monitor Attendee Connection Status
- Advanced Topics: Screen Sharing, Voice Over IP, and Live Video
- Advanced Topics: Using Two Computers to Monitor a Web Seminar
Advanced topics: Screen sharing, VoIP and live video
In this section, I discuss how bandwidth is considered when multiple bandwidth-intensive features such as screen sharing, voice over IP (VoIP), and live webcam video are being used simultaneously. If you won’t be sharing live video or using VoIP, you may want to skip this section, as it can get complicated. However, if you are an advanced user of the system who wants to squeeze the last bit of performance out of Breeze, this section will help you achieve that.
When a meeting host is using screen sharing along with VoIP and live video with the Camera and Voice pod, a lot of information needs to be transmitted from computer to computer. To account for this, Breeze has a sophisticated scheme for handling scenarios where individual meeting participants have constrained bandwidth, and to decide how to keep users from falling too far behind while still having a good meeting experience. Breeze Meeting broadcasts simple meeting events like slide changes and chat first, then voice, then screen sharing, then live video.
To describe how this works in a real-world scenario, let’s say a meeting is being conducted with video (at 50 Kbps), voice (at 22 Kbps) and screen sharing. A host and two participants are in the meeting. Here is how Breeze prioritizes the various streams to ensure an optimal experience.
Lisa is hosting the meeting on a corporate LAN that supports a 10 Mbps connection, so Breeze has a lot of bandwidth to play with. Even if Lisa is sharing her screen at a 1600x1200 pixel resolution and showing a slide show of colorful snapshots from the company party, there is plenty of bandwidth to broadcast her screen with little or no effect to her video and audio streams. If all users in the meeting are on this type of connection, Breeze does have a 24-bit color option for extreme screen sharing that is turned off by default. However, be forewarned that this feature is intended only for those customers with highly performant networks. The 24-bit setting, which can be turned on in the Share pod's options menu, would do a good job of filling that 10 mbps connection to capacity with beautiful, high-fidelity renditions of Lisa’s Christmas pictures.
Dawn is a meeting participant attending from home on a 500 Kbps DSL connection. In this scenario, 22 Kbps are used for voice and 50 Kbps are used for video, leaving 428 Kbps for screen sharing. If the changes on Lisa’s screen are small, or if the screen is displaying mostly text, the screen-sharing experience is flawless. But if Lisa suddenly presents a full-screen picture of the Christmas party that represents 3000 Kbps of information, Breeze freezes the live video stream, leaves the audio stream alone, and uses 478 Kbps for several seconds to re-render Dawn’s view of Lisa’s screen. After the screen is redrawn, Breeze unfreezes the live video stream back to its normal state. Because screen sharing is almost always more important than live video, Breeze always takes bandwidth from live video in favor of screen sharing to optimize the experience.
Marty is participating in a meeting from his home with a 48 Kbps modem. If 22 Kbps are used for the voice, that leaves only 26 Kbps for video and screen sharing (Breeze does require some bandwidth to keep the basic meeting running, but it is negligible enough to ignore for this example). When an event happens that must be rendered by Marty’s computer, such as Lisa moving a picture around on the screen, Breeze automatically freezes Lisa’s live video stream in Marty’s view until the screen sharing catches up to Lisa’s computer. When the updated screen-sharing image is finished rendering, Breeze compresses the live video stream and ignores frames to squeeze the 50 kbps live video stream into the remaining 26 Kbps. Because voice is typically most critical for a smooth meeting experience, Breeze preserves the fidelity of the audio stream and reduces screen sharing and video fidelity to keep the audio smooth.
As you can see, Breeze uses sophisticated techniques for keeping the meeting experience as seamless as possible for all users, regardless of their bandwidth.
