element-hq / element-hq/element-call

EC 0.70: Camera switch on mobile decreases quality/sharpness

Open
#2,821 8 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
T-Defect
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
996
Forks
215
Avg merge
1d 6h
Merged PRs (30d)
54

Description

### Steps to reproduce

**First of all thank you for this great new release and the stunning new features! Awesome work!!!**

The camera switch on mobiles is extremely helpful. However, switching cameras reproducible reduces quality / sharpness from that point on.

- Having a call with my wife I see her in absolutely great quality (She's on her iPhone 14 Pro Max, Frontcam. I'm on Element-Desktop)
- Asking her to switch to the back camera this works, but the picture is not as sharp as it should be. Does not significantly improve after a few seconds.
- When she swiches back to the front camera, the video is quite blurry with a bad quality. This improves after a few seconds, but it's still significantly worse than the quality after the initial call establishment.
It also does not further improve even after minutes in the call.

Ending the call and starting a new call, the quality is perfect again. As soon as camera is switched, the quality decreases again significantly. This behavior is reproducible.

Interesting additional information: She says that she sees the quality decrease also in her own small monitor picture in EX-IOS.

### Outcome

#### What did you expect?

Video quality should stay after camera switching as it was before.

#### What happened instead?

As soon as the first camera switching was performed, quality decreases significantly and stays bad over the complete call, regardless if more camera switchings are done or not. To get back to the used perfect quality you need to end and re-establish the call.

### Operating system

IOS 18.1

### Browser information

EX-IOS app

### URL for webapp

EC version 0.70

### Will you send logs?

No

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reproducing the camera-switch sequence in the EX-IOS app on iOS 18.1 with Element Call 0.70, comparing video quality before and after switching between front and back cameras. Done means video quality remains comparable to the initial call quality after switching cameras.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ios, typescript
Domain
audio-video-rtc, mobile-dev
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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