Comment by bArray

I've literally been here (many) years ago whilst trying to stream video from a potato Linux SBC via WiFi. As you walked further away, the H264 stream would just die and hang, no matter what you did. Stream JPEGs? Worked excellently and adjusted the number of JPEGs per second depending on connection (only requested the next frame after the current one arrived or a timeout occurred).

This got me thinking about video calls, which have be notoriously bad on bad connections. Half the time I am just streaming a screen with static information on it, we're not watching videos together. And yet the streaming pipeline is optimised as this article suggests for the higher bandwidth modes - when we're never really using it at all.

The most important part about a video call is rarely the video, is usually the audio. It's counter-intuitive but you are better off having your call without video than you are without sound, and yet when the video falls over it takes the audio with it. Insanity!