Bug Report OBS Virtual Cam output is blury and pixelish

[prizmracer11]

I'm not sure anyone has completely cracked this nut but, what I have found gets me about 75% of the way there with sending the virtual camera to zoom more clearly is reducing the canvas and output size to 640x360, keeping the shared windows (powerpoint, chrome etc) as small as is practical, and changing the scale filtering to Area. The scale filtering seems to be at least some of the trouble but it doesn't fix it 100%. In case it comes up, you can replicate similar text clarity problems with Ecamm's virtual camera ($480 per year). If I had to guess, zoom is probably screwing around with the video in order to keep things flowing. The same blurriness will come out sometimes with zoom's own whiteboard and with document camera setups based on webcams directly connected to zoom and not through obs.

 

[prizmracer11]

I'm not sure anyone has completely cracked this nut but, what I have found gets me about 75% of the way there with sending the virtual camera to zoom more clearly is reducing the canvas and output size to 640x360, keeping the shared windows (powerpoint, chrome etc) as small as is practical, and changing the scale filtering to Area. The scale filtering seems to be at least some of the trouble but it doesn't fix it 100%. In case it comes up, you can replicate similar text clarity problems with Ecamm's virtual camera ($480 per year). If I had to guess, zoom is probably screwing around with the video in order to keep things flowing. The same blurriness will come out sometimes with zoom's own whiteboard and with document camera setups based on webcams directly connected to zoom and not through obs.

Also for things like powerpoint bringing in the presentation as an image stack helps. If you want to maintain appear animations (as in making bullets on a slide appear one by one) you can copy and paste the slide and delete the bullets on at a time in the copied slides). Hopefully these tips help some of y’all

 

[nwtravler]

Zoom is the worst but Teams isn't much better. They are degradeing the quality of video to free up bandwidth.

My solution has been to output a full screen window preview then share that window. This keeps the content in my scene crystal clear, but Zoom (still very bad) Teams (2x better) still limit frame rate so the live video can be slightly choppy at times.

 

[AndreasK]

Does anybody has a solution of this problem? I'm working with WEBEX and MS Teams and with both programs I have the same issue by using OBS virtual cam....

 

[kentacle]

I found this post. https://jkudo.medium.com/how-to-achieve-zoom-full-hd-1080p-1920-1080-delivery-with-obs-fea9ed1c8c8
This guy recommends to use Screen share -> advanced -> Content from 2nd camera from zoom.
In this way it works great.

 

[babunera]

I did some Zoom events recently, and what I learned from it:

Zoom caps your webcam (any camera, even virtualcam) at 360p.

It have some ways to improve to 720p or 1080p, that involves buying a Business Plan and asking the support to enable HD in your account, join the meeting with a Room Connector, etc.

Official documentation:

Group HD

Note: As our world comes together to slow the spread of COVID-19 and stays connected through Zoom globally, we are working to quickly scale our bandwidth during this unprecedented demand. For the t...

support.zoom.us

Sharing your screen can go up in video resolution, but brings some really low frame per second. I do not recommend.

In the meeting, click on the check green icon, then hit video tab to see the resolution and fps of your webcam.

Hope it helps!

 

[breich]

This was my experience as well. I have been fighting this for weeks, and the resolution for me was to go to Zoom settings and select enable "Group HD". This enables 720p video. It is also possible to enable 1080p but you must request Zoom support to enable it. This solved the problem for me. I do have a Zoom business account so not certain if this is available on a non-business account. I'm also planning to test using the webinar feature but have not yet done so. Hope this helps.

I did some Zoom events recently, and what I learned from it:

Zoom caps your webcam (any camera, even virtualcam) at 360p.

It have some ways to improve to 720p or 1080p, that involves buying a Business Plan and asking the support to enable HD in your account, join the meeting with a Room Connector, etc.

Official documentation:

Group HD

Note: As our world comes together to slow the spread of COVID-19 and stays connected through Zoom globally, we are working to quickly scale our bandwidth during this unprecedented demand. For the t...

support.zoom.us

Sharing your screen can go up in video resolution, but brings some really low frame per second. I do not recommend.

In the meeting, click on the check green icon, then hit video tab to see the resolution and fps of your webcam.

Hope it helps!

 

[Halcon]

I experience the same problem. The resolution decreases for virtualcam output when using google meet. I started to use OBS one year ago, and I havent been able to solve this issue. Still the same problem.

 

[babunera]

I experience the same problem. The resolution decreases for virtualcam output when using google meet. I started to use OBS one year ago, and I havent been able to solve this issue. Still the same problem.

Meet and almost all video conference apps decreases the resolution of your cam, besides video compression. It's not virtual cam fault.

Meet = 720p MAX video + compressed.

 

[Marcelo Soria]

Hi. The last version of Zoom resolved this. You should have a paid user, and set in the web user accouunt, go to Account Settings. In Meeting (Advanced) and look to Group HD Video. You can check this seeing the Statistics in the Zoom client when you have a meet stablished.
:)

 

[Beezbaz]

Hi. The last version of Zoom resolved this. You should have a paid user, and set in the web user accouunt, go to Account Settings. In Meeting (Advanced) and look to Group HD Video. You can check this seeing the Statistics in the Zoom client when you have a meet stablished.
:)

I am logged in to Zoom web using a paid user and under Account Settings -> In Meeting (Advanced) there is no Group HD Video ?

 

[DAOWAce]

So, uh, any resolution for this 2 years later?

I don't know if it's something with my setup, but even in the latest version of OBS Studio, when I receive the output of the virtual cam to a media player (tested MPC-HC and VLC), the image is slightly blurry with color subsampling (like you'd see in low quality JPG images).

I don't know why everyone in this topic is talking about Zoom, but that is not my use case for this feature of OBS.