Forum Discussion

gwtechllc's avatar
gwtechllc
Active Contributor
4 years ago

Chromacam usability

I have been hosting meetings for my clients for about 9 months and decided to try the GoToMeeting Hub Virtual Background.  Aside from the relatively robust hardware requirements (which I've met), I'm wondering if anyone has had Internet bandwidth issues using this feature.  It is currently showing as in Beta-testing, and I had 200 Mbps down/20 Mbps upload broadband, and recently I'd had several meetings where the video/audio began breaking up.  The meeting had about a dozen participants, sharing a screen and using cloud recording.  I had to switch from the Chromacam virtual camera back to my physical webcam to restore continuity of the meeting I was hosting.  It appears that the upstream bandwidth required to send video up to (Chromacam hosting) and back down is impairing the basic meeting functionality.  I use Zoom with my other clients, and the background is locally processed rather than being a cloud service so this isn't a problem there.  Hopefully others have had experiences to compare?  Thanks for your feedback.

  • bigtom's avatar
    bigtom
    4 years ago

    gwtechllc I just recently contracted with another service and moving away from G2M and the ChromaCam issues are one of the very few reasons for this decision.  It seems pretty clear that G2M thinks what they have is good enough and it isn't. Sadly, going elsewhere is the only option we have. G2M took over 2 years to deliver the ChromaCam integration and has been claiming ChromaCam works for over a year and seems to be ignoring the fact that it doesn't. 

  • AshC's avatar
    AshC
    Retired GoTo Contributor
    4 years ago

    gwtechllc  This is more of a local processing issue than bandwidth, unless you're using Chromacam to share video backgrounds or similar, thereby increasing the video f/s demand.  Have you checked your local processing behavior to make sure it is not approaching to 80-100%?

    • gwtechllc's avatar
      gwtechllc
      Active Contributor
      4 years ago

      I had to reinstall ChromaCam to test this, and I'm not clear on what the results are telling me.  When ChromaCam is in Preview (no meeting), it is using over 13% CPU.  However, when I start it meeting and select it for Video input (using Meet Now - no participants), it uses less than 1%.  In my work as a meeting facilitator, I need to be confident that the A/V quality is consistent on the cloud recording.  When the A/V starts breaking up during a meeting, I need to take steps to correct the problem.

      • AshC's avatar
        AshC
        Retired GoTo Contributor
        4 years ago

        That sounds like it's working a little bit better, but I recommend hosting some test broadcasts with all the materials and webcams you plan to incorporate, while recording to the cloud to ensure the playback quality is as expected.

    • gwtechllc's avatar
      gwtechllc
      Active Contributor
      4 years ago

      I had not checked this specifically, although I did not notice other symptoms of an overtaxed processor.  In order to facilitate testing, would you suppose that a G2M would need to have a similar number of participants (a dozen)?  I just want to clarify the use case.  Thanks for the reply.

      • AshC's avatar
        AshC
        Retired GoTo Contributor
        4 years ago

        gwtechllc  The number of participants should not matter for local processing power demands.