How Do I Improve the Video Quality for My Online Lessons?

The quality of the video can make or break an online lesson. Remote teachers need to have the best video quality possible. This article will provide the reasons for bad quality video and some tips to improve the video quality for using OKIOCAM in your online teaching/learning. 

Change your resolution settings

While OKIOCAM models support full HD 1080p (1920x1080), most video conferencing applications, such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, automatically set the resolution to 720p or less to prevent high latency. If you need to present a clear document for your online classes, here are the instructions to change your resolution settings:

How to change the resolution setting in Zoom

How to change the resolution setting in Google Meet

Poor lighting in the room

All kinds of cameras perform better under sufficient lighting. Under a low lighting environment, the camera does not get enough information for capturing details, which results in blurry and grainy images. Here are some things you can do to improve the lighting.

Let there be light

Moving the document camera closer to the window or putting a table lamp next to your document significantly helps get better image quality results. 

Adjust the camera exposure

OKIOCAM allows you to adjust the exposure manually with just a few taps on the camera. For how to adjust the exposure and other useful OKIOCAM features, please refer to the below articles:

What do the buttons do on my OKIOCAM S?

What do the buttons do on my OKIOCAM T?

Bad internet connection

The possible causes of low quality during a video call include your home network, your internet connection, or the video-calling services — or maybe all three. 

The first thing you should do is check your internet connection (determined by your internet service provider) and your home network (determined by its connections). You can have a speed test at Speedtest, nPerf, or Comparitech. 

Connecting to the internet via Ethernet ports

Although it might be a bit inconvenient, connecting your computer directly to a router using an Ethernet cable is much faster and more reliable than connecting through WiFi. You don’t usually notice the internet speed when browsing or checking emails, but for online lessons, Ethernet has superior download and upload capabilities as compared to regular WiFi.

It's not you. It's them
Sometimes the latency and poor quality are caused by overloading servers from Zoom, Google Meet, and other video-conferencing services. In this case, there are some things you can fix and some you can’t. You can adjust the time of day you have your online lessons (if possible). The services have recently been experiencing high demand from people working at home during certain times of the day. As a result, you might experience less lag time during off-peak hours. On top of that, you should also check if there's anyone in the house streaming or downloading large files during your video call.

Don't overwork your computer

Your central processing unit (CPU) is the key component to all of the processes running on your computer. When the CPU is overworked, your computer is likely to become sluggish, programs may freeze, and your device might get hot to the touch. Running too many apps or running a program designed for a faster computer can lead to an overworked CPU and, in turn, the bad video quality on your online lessons. 

Restarting always helps

Your computer will be strongly affected if you have 20 Chrome tabs running at the same time. Restarting the computer will help to ensure no unnecessary programs are running in the background and occupying RAM capacity.