[bufferoverflow]

The thing about video call apps is - seemingly, no matter how great the internet is on both ends, the video quality is still laggy and blocky. We have 30 Mbps on both ends. That's supposed to be near bluray quality. But that's not what we get. Even when I use the crappy 720p camera, what I get over the internet is much worse.

From our testing, Whatsapp is one of the worst. Zoom is in between. Hangouts is usually decent. But again, nowhere near bluray quality.

[crowbahr]

I was shocked at how good the quality was in facetiming my in-laws on my wife's ipad. I've been using hangouts, signal, slack and duo for video calls and they were never nearly as crisp and nice as facetime was.

I think Discord was similarly good but... Discord just isn't what I'm going to voice call family on... realistically ever.

[puggsy]

Apple has more control over its platform and can ensure video acceleration works for all participants.

Conference calls with a central server are particularly suspectible to "lowest common denominator" issues.

[crowbahr]

That makes a lot of sense. Vertical integration at its finest I guess.

[southerntofu]

There are different considerations: do you have 30Mbit/s upload or download? do you have hardware acceleration available to make a smaller/better encoding? is it actually used by your app? Otherwise, your app may restrict encoding quality settings so that it can run on many more devices (maybe that's configurable).

Also to consider: where does the connection flow through? if you're both going through Google/Amazon servers (SFU, etc), it's quite possible your ISP will provide a route with a decent bandwidth. It's also quite possible if you establish a direct P2P link or through a route your ISP considers less important, they'll slow it down or simply oversubscribe this route.