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 _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org 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@lists.fedoraproject.org
