Why is my video laggy or choppy?

Choppy or stuttering video means frames are being dropped somewhere between the camera and the screen. Three places are possible, and they are easy to tell apart.

Open Settings and enable “Display video quality statistics”. Each video then shows its resolution, bitrate and a Limited by: line:

• bandwidth — the network cannot carry the stream. Check your connection, and prefer a wired one or a closer access point. Lowering “Video quality” and “Screen sharing quality” to Low reduces what you are asking of it.
• cpu — the computer cannot encode fast enough. This is the common one on laptops, and it gets much worse with several people in a bubble: in a peer-to-peer conversation your machine encodes your camera once per person you are talking to. Close other applications, stop the screen share if you have one running, or set the quality to Low.
• Nothing shown, but the video is still jerky — the problem is more likely on the receiving side. A viewer whose machine cannot decode fast enough sees stutter that nobody else sees.

Two things WorkAdventure does about it by itself: it lowers the frame rate and the resolution of small tiles rather than sending full quality into a thumbnail, and when your encoders cannot keep up in a group conversation it moves the bubble onto our media server, so your machine encodes once instead of once per participant. Both happen without asking you.

If it persists on a machine that ought to cope, the browser matters. That automatic relief relies on the browser telling us the encoder is struggling, which Chrome and Edge do and Firefox does not — on Firefox, lowering the quality setting by hand is the fix.

The full explanation of how this works is in this article.