Zoom? Teams? Different algorithms?

[Crawford]

Hi,

I had a really horrible attempt at a Live Stream over Facebook this morning, after our IT Team proved unable to set-up either a Zoom Webinar or a Teams Live event. We had difficulties with identifying which camera and microphone feeds to follow, and multiple disconnections during the event itself.

To minimise the chances of this happening again, I am keen to understand the technology better.

Are there differences in how Zoom and Teams handle the data underlying live streams? I doubt we will use Facebook Live again, but what about things like Adobe Connect?

If services compress signals, is there any evidence that one or other does it “better” than the others? The obvious measures of “better” would seem to be:

1. The amount of compression, reducing bandwidth requirements.

2. The tolerance of signal degradation?

In keeping with this, does anyone know if different services interrupt at different levels? Is it relevant that, compared to broadcasts, Netflix never struggles whilst Amazon does sometimes.

I appreciate that much of this may not be in the public domain, or rather technical, but I’m trying to work out whether any such differences really exist -or is it just random variation: any service could fail on a given day?

Crawf

 

[BigT]

I can't comment on the technical details and haven't used some of the technology you're considering but can maybe give you relevant experience of one of them.

We've used go2meeting, zoom, skype and webex to varying degrees over the years. Right now we've settled on Zoom for maybe three years now and also use Skype for some adhoc 1-2-1 meetings.

Zoom has been a clear winner for us. We host webinars, training sessions, large and small meetings up to about 1,000 people. The only drop outs or degradation in quality I've ever experienced (in two years of 30 hours of zoom activity a week) have always been as a result of local wifi or internet performance. Everyone who has good solid internet connections never seems to have any problems.

In fact I just checked our dashboard and in the last 12 months we've had 5.9m meeting minutes in just under 51,000 'meetings' (includes webinars) with over 180,000 participants in those meetings. I can't remember the last time out IT team had any problems with people complaining about drop outs or video/audio quality if that helps.

Skype often craps out.

 

[Turn]

I've heard good things about https://meet.google.com/

 

[ChrisD.]

I work for VMware and we use Zoom, it's been perfect for my usage (ad-hoc meetings with colleagues and customers, remote control to help fix issues in customer environments, deployments etc) and it has worked without issue for corporate wide presentations.

I tried the Facebook thing with family and it was terrible, loads of delay. We soon went back to using my personal meeting room in Zoom!

 

[Vince]

We are currently on teams & zoom, we did a big zoom quiz event last night using a professional quiz master while simultaneously using teams for our break out rooms, I used multiple mic and camera feeds so I could be live on both at the same time. I can assure you that they handle video differently and i'm sure Microsoft have the edge over zoom here in terms of quality and compression, also security wise zoom has been getting some stick recently so if using it you do need to make sure you follow some simple steps in order no to get zoom bombed etc. We managed 100 people in around 10 teams and given we have some people who are really not tech savvy it went off really well.

I have had a few back to back teams / zoom swapping between the platforms and zoom seems to break video well before teams if one side is having bandwidth issues. There are also issues with teams integration into outlook (where you book scheduled, hidden room meetings) and for whatever reason the button rarely appears in outlook so I wrote a batch file with some reg files to fix that which we pushed out by gpo on day 2 of using teams.

Honest opinion is that MS appear to have nailed teams it is a far superior platform to zoom imo.

 

[Vince]

I work for VMware and we use Zoom, it's been perfect for my usage (ad-hoc meetings with colleagues and customers, remote control to help fix issues in customer environments, deployments etc) and it has worked without issue for corporate wide presentations.

I tried the Facebook thing with family and it was terrible, loads of delay. We soon went back to using my personal meeting room in Zoom!

One day when you have 5 mins I would love to talk Horizons. I did see it and a vmware rep at an event I was invited to at Mercedes so perhaps I could just dig out the emails. I had just a couple of questions more on the tech side and general requirements. Also, I know they stopped windows appliances now but jesus they need to sort out the "pipe errors" that keep haunting the windows appliance, I have had and resolved the issue 3 times now and for whatever reason it just keeps coming back. Oh and hello mate

 

[ChrisD.]

One day when you have 5 mins I would love to talk Horizons. I did see it and a vmware rep at an event I was invited to at Mercedes so perhaps I could just dig out the emails. I had just a couple of questions more on the tech side and general requirements. Also, I know they stopped windows appliances now but jesus they need to sort out the "pipe errors" that keep haunting the windows appliance, I have had and resolved the issue 3 times now and for whatever reason it just keeps coming back. Oh and hello mate

Hi mate, I don't really cover EUC I'm afraid, I'm more SDDC and hybrid cloud with VMC on AWS, NSX, vSAN, HCX etc. I do run Horizon at home to play around with it.

As for vCenter on Windows, just migrate to the appliance.

 

[BigT]

I have heard good things about Teams but never actually used it. i think the other thing that Teams has an edge with is cost. Isn't it the case if you're already a corporate user of O365 and stuff then teams is effectively free? Zoom on the other hand, even with modest volume discounting we get is about $8/user/month + more for the odd webinar, physical meeting room integration (not making much use of that at the moment!) and 'large' participant account.

 

[Vince]

I have heard good things about Teams but never actually used it. i think the other thing that Teams has an edge with is cost. Isn't it the case if you're already a corporate user of O365 and stuff then teams is effectively free? Zoom on the other hand, even with modest volume discounting we get is about $8/user/month + more for the odd webinar, physical meeting room integration (not making much use of that at the moment!) and 'large' participant account.

Teams is has 3 versions as far as I am aware the free corporate version seems to just be free from what I can work out, we don't have 365 but we do have an OVS and also a VLSC agreement with them so perhaps it worked that way somehow. Either way teams is very good, good enough that everyone where I work seems to have picked it up perfectly. I set up a load of kind of default options when I set it up and just invited everybody setting around 20 selected people as owners. I didn't tell them anything just let teams send the email and watched everybody slowly filter in. Some people needed help but really 80% of people just jumped in and started using it. Over the past few months people have realised their power and rooms have started popping up and people are making full use of it. Somebody opened up "The Kitchen" where you can go and have a chat at particular times on particular days. Our social committee jumped on board and have been building social events around it. Really it was the perfect product for us free and at a time where we really needed it. I don't normally praise MS that much as most stuff sucks in some way or another but teams really is some of their best work.

 

[Vince]

Hi mate, I don't really cover EUC I'm afraid, I'm more SDDC and hybrid cloud with VMC on AWS, NSX, vSAN, HCX etc. I do run Horizon at home to play around with it.

As for vCenter on Windows, just migrate to the appliance.

Probably not the place and I don't want to derail the OPs thread more than I already have (sorry @Crawford) but I might tag you in another thread as I haven't touched horizons yet despite being given a free evaluation key by your colleagues a year or more ago. I would like to get your opinion on it vs it's competition though.

 

[ChrisD.]

Probably not the place and I don't want to derail the OPs thread more than I already have (sorry @Crawford) but I might tag you in another thread as I haven't touched horizons yet despite being given a free evaluation key by your colleagues a year or more ago. I would like to get your opinion on it vs it's competition though.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/vmware-certification-general-advice-thread.18884454/

 

[Duke]

We use Webex Teams and Google Meet and both seem decent.

 

[Sparx]

We've been using both Slack for chat and GoToMeeting for video calls since lockdown - both work really well for us.