On Wed, 2020-11-11 at 23:18 +0100, Roberto Ragusa wrote:
On 2020-11-10 18:49, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> I occasionally participate in Zoom calls using my Android tablet, and
> everything Just Works(tm). I'd like to do the same on my desktop with
> Fedora, but despite testing three different cheap webcams the big issue
> is always with the sound. I can hear the other people perfectly, and
> the video is fine, but the audio from my side is muddy and nearly
> impossible to understand. I've tried with and without headphones in
> case it's a feedback issue (though not using the headphone mic). It
> doesn't make any difference. Surely not all the webcam mics can be so
> bad? How would anyone ever use them?
Sound quality may be bad for many reasons. I see you have already done
some investigation but let me list some trivial and not trivial hints:
- microphones are bad, especially laptop ones, often taking a lot of fan noise
(a bit better if they are positioned on top of the screen, worse if they are
near the keyboard)
- check your sound level, it may be too low (noise) or too high and clipping
(distorsion), use pavucontrol to see the vumeter; distorted voice is badly
mangled by voice compression codecs
- do not create feedback (use earphones), the software echo cancellation
may mess everything up
- if you use bluetooth, the earphone+mic mode (HSP/HFP) may sound quite
bad, because of poor codecs (this may be related to "non free world"
software choices, but it should affect playback more than recording)
- if it happens on a specific software, it may be related to its codec choice
for some of these causes you can do tests by recording yourself and listening
back.
After a lot of experimentation I've bought a quite good external USB mic and
of course my voice is a lot better than with the laptop (stereo!) mic.
Next (off) topic: how to send a good video.
Webcams are generally very bad (mostly very noisy 720p).
Smartphones have hugely better cameras (even on front), as soon as I'll
find a bit of time I'm going to experiment on how to use an old
smartphone as a webcam, there is a SmartCam kernel module
that creates a v4l device that gets data from a phone.
Thanks. As I need something for a conference Right Now I've connected
two webcams. One has decent video, the other has not-terrible audio.
It's ridiculous but it works for the moment. When I have time I'll
explore other options.
I've seen several articles about using your smartphone as a webcam.
Some of them even mention Linux.
poc