My wife meets with a group every week using Zoom. She's been using her Windows 10 laptop without any problems, but we got her a good quality webcam this week so she can use her Windows 10 desktop. The outgoing video freezes intermittently, but incoming does not. It does the same thing with Skype. Of course Zoom's and Skype's help suggestions are useless. The camera works fine with the Windows camera. I tried the camera on my own desktop, which is almost identical to hers, and it worked fine on a Zoom call. I built both desktops several years ago, with higher performance video card, maximum memory, etc, so the machine isn't working very hard to run things. Her drivers all up to date, I've tried different USB ports to no effect, and we're downloading at ~50 Mbps and uploading at ~5. I'm thinking it has to be something going on with her desktop, but I'm at a loss. Any suggestions from The Hive for what else to look into?
Thanks!
You might run through the list here and see if they help.
https://windows101tricks.com/webcam-freezes-windows-10/
Hmm. I know you said it should be a higher performance desktop machine, but I'd start with checking to see what else is running. Any chance there's another app running that's hogging CPU or RAM? I just ask because recently I had an app sitting idle that was somehow using 25% of my CPU on its own.
What resolution is the camera, and do you have USB 3.0 on the machine?
Agree with the suggestion to see if there's something else running in the background, and I'd do a speed test on your internet while you're having issues. Depending on the desktop's proximity to your WiFi router, I'd also look into a mesh system for WiFi.
An important thing to understand is what else is going on from an internet perspective. Do you have four kids constantly streaming shows/video games like I do?
dj06482 (Forum Supporter) said:
Agree with the suggestion to see if there's something else running in the background, and I'd do a speed test on your internet while you're having issues. Depending on the desktop's proximity to your WiFi router, I'd also look into a mesh system for WiFi.
An important thing to understand is what else is going on from an internet perspective. Do you have four kids constantly streaming shows/video games like I do?
Mesh wifi is a good suggestion too - at the beginning of the pandemic I had trouble keeping up with everyone in my house on work/school zoom calls with 20mb up - I replaced my router with a pack of the Google Nest ones and things improved a lot.
Thanks for the suggestions! I'll give the items in CJ's link a try.
No VPN.
One of the first things I did was look for anything running in the background that might be hogging CPU or RAM space, but the max at the time was barely 20% usage, even with Chrome, Outlook, and a couple of other things running. It was hardly using any CPU or RAM space after I shut all of the extra apps down.
The desktops are connected to the router via ethernet, so wireless is out. The laptop she was using without problems is on the wifi. No other streaming was going on while she was having problems and she was getting ~5 Mbps upload and 50 Mbps download speeds at the time.
It has to be something going on with the machine itself, since it's the only one having problems. As cheap as these cameras are, I might pick up another one from a different manufacturer just to see what happens.
Hmm. Is there anything else connected via USB?
What is your up/download speed? Possible that the low-res stuff coming in is more than covered by the download speed but you're trying to stuff too much data on the upload side.
Check your memory usage as well. If too many processes are running there isn't enough room for the video.
My video card has 6gb of its own memory, and with my 50m upload speed, I could zoom with a 4k camera (not that zoom supports it) and not get glitchy.
Something sounds like it has a bottleneck with her camera getting TO the server.
grover
Dork
4/28/21 11:00 p.m.
Sounds like the video card may be going bad- or heating up.
Upload speed is ~5 Mbps. Memory usage stays pretty low.
@grover, I was wondering if it might be the video card. I've set this afternoon aside to work on this. If the above suggestions don't work, I'll swap in the video card from my computer and see what happens.
When you say the Zoom video freezes, does it recover or do you have to intervene manually to unfreeze it?
It will freeze for a few seconds, run for a few seconds, freeze for a few seconds, ad nauseum. It does the same thing with Skype. Works with Windows camera just fine, no freezing. Works on my almost identical machine just fine. I've run Malwarebytes and CCleaner to make sure she doesn't have any crap running in the background. I'm going to spend some time with it this afternoon to see what else I can rule out.
Sounds to me like the differences are that when you run into freezes with Zoom and Skype, your making use of the network. I'd check if you have transmission errors (dropped packets) showing up on the machine that is causing the issues. Video tends to be sensitive to dropped data packets so this might not show up in other use cases.
Might be something as simple as a slightly iffy network cable.
BenB (Forum Supporter) said:
Upload speed is ~5 Mbps. Memory usage stays pretty low.
@grover, I was wondering if it might be the video card. I've set this afternoon aside to work on this. If the above suggestions don't work, I'll swap in the video card from my computer and see what happens.
I think you'll find this to be the problem, especially if your IP throttles.
Depending on your browser, zoom client, router health, and a few other factors, an IP's upload speed can squarely be considered a max speed or an advertised "up to" speed. To give you an idea, if you want to watch a streaming video at 720p, you need at least 3mb. It's quite possible that you're hitting a bottlneck with upload speed.
speedtest.net. Check your actual upload speed IRL.
I pay for the cheapest of the cheap Fios and this is what I get on wifi using Edge.
So, it turned out to be a glitchy USB socket. Stumbled into the solution when I rearranged the USB plugs. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. Just another reminder of why I was so happy to get out of IT. I'd rather track down an electrical glitch on a rusty British car than screw around with computers!
Thanks for your help, everyone!
I love simple fixes! Congrats.
