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by blyry 1991 days ago
I live 30ms away from my boss. What do I have to do to get low latency 4k (or 1080 since 4k cams are expensive) conferencing for one on ones? Serious question. This was a problem before wfh and now it's an even bigger issue for me. Id rather work somewhere for half the income where I have to mask up and deal with people if it means I can stop spending hours on terrible video calls every day.
4 comments

You can get extremely low latency audio with Mumble, feels like they're right there. I've used it for podcasting once.
I've come to two conclusions about video conferences:

I really like cameras on so I can see people's faces. It feels much more like seeing people in person and the fact that my new team doesn't do that is making it harder to feel part of a group.

While I really like cameras on for calls, video quality isn't important (to me), but audio quality really is. Bad audio whether it's background noise, bad internet, echo etc. makes vc very tiring. The video could be 640x480 and 1 FPS and that would probably be fine - helps me know there's a real person on the other end of the call.

Audio carries 80% of the intellectual content of most telepresence. That's why when there's a live cross on TV News and the video works but the audio is missing, they give up and return to the studio until the audio is up.
I don't know if there's a realistic way to get low latency video[1]. But the way to get low latency audio is to get as close to POTS as you can. All of the little delays here and there on modern internet audio paths add up. More so if you've got wifi on either side.

[1] I mean, ISDN video calling is probably low latency, but good luck getting an ISDN line installed these days, and video quality was trash.

Good question. I wonder what the basic delay of p2p WebRTC video is.