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. Regards. -- Roberto Ragusa mail at robertoragusa.it _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
