Thanks for the feedback, sorry your first call didn't go well.
When the connection is poor, as it sounds like it was in this case, would you be okay if we fell back to audio-only and explained why? This seems like a better experience than trying to fight through lag, but we want to be careful not to arbitrarily cut off your video feed.
In Skype I have the option to show call technical info turned on.
It is immensely helpful since it shows continually updated values for latency, packet loss (in both directions), codec in use, bitrates etc. From that I can easily tell what the issues are (latency spikes vs packet loss are hard to distinguish due to the same symptoms).
That isn't helpful for the masses, but you can display some sort of connection quality indicator. You can also offer suggestions on seeing latency spikes or packet loss (try to work out of they are upstream or downstream).
The usual solution to video is to reduce bitrate, resolution and framerate. Blocky video that is taking seconds to update is an obvious indicator of connection quality issues.
Thanks Roger -- we really want to create a connection quality indicator like you describe, kind of like the number of bars on your cell connection.
One of our biggest frustrations with existing services is that it's hard to tell why the call quality is poor - is it my connection, your connection, or the service's fault?
Can I shoot you an email when we get a beta version of that indicator working? I'd love to get your feedback on it.
We are collecting anonymous data about the network, browser, etc. and tying it back to core metrics like call length, but there's always more we can do. I'm really hoping that more browsers start to support the network information API natively too: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAPI/Network_Info...
When the connection is poor, as it sounds like it was in this case, would you be okay if we fell back to audio-only and explained why? This seems like a better experience than trying to fight through lag, but we want to be careful not to arbitrarily cut off your video feed.