Flickering zoom

[didds]

daughter of a friend's laptop...

win 10
the video stream flicxkers
laptop is fine to stream youtube, facebook video, facetime etc... but once zoom is used the entire screen flickers. If zoom is then styopped the screen display continues to flicker.

any ideas?

I'm asking her if the same expereince occurs via using both the zoom app and via the web (I think they are both options), but anyone any ideas?
All I can think of is to reinstall zoom but the continuing flickering scenario makes me think there must be more to it?

ive had no chance to google etc - uim writing this en rout6e to park run with a chum!

[servodude]

Not heard of similar.
Possibly, check if the screen flickers when using the webcam in the camera app?
(to rule out a HW/driver issue with that?)

-sd

[bungeejumper]

I've found the web routine to be more jumpy and flickery than the Zoom app, and sometimes the image freezes for a couple of seconds (including sound as well) - but it settles down after five minutes or so. I tend to put this down to the fact that we only use our ageing Acer laptop (Celeron, 4gb) intermittently, so maybe there are particularly heavy background processes going on?

BJ

[xeny]

I'm asking her if the same expereince occurs via using both the zoom app and via the web (I think they are both options), but anyone any ideas?
All I can think of is to reinstall zoom but the continuing flickering scenario makes me think there must be more to it?

Video encode/decode is often partly offloaded to the GPU (even if integrated), and it is possible Zoom is finding a bug in the existing video driver. I'd suggest looking if there is an update to the driver.

[xeny]

I tend to put this down to the fact that we only use our ageing Acer laptop (Celeron, 4gb) intermittently, so maybe there are particularly heavy background processes going on?

BJ

That's a possibility - especially if you essentially turn the laptop on and make the call. You could perhaps test by giving it say 30 minutes to warm up in advance, or make a point of pausing windows updates before the call and see if that helps?

Another possibility is that Zoom may be assessing how well the laptop is coping, and progressively turn down resolution/image quality until it is no longer saturating the CPU? Is there an option to manually reduce image quality in Zoom in advance to see if that improves matters?

In general, video chat is probably the second most demanding activity computers are commonly used for (the most demanding is gaming) so it is where people will most often encounter a machine not being fast enough for what they are asking of it.

[Infrasonic]

I tend to put this down to the fact that we only use our ageing Acer laptop (Celeron, 4gb) intermittently, so maybe there are particularly heavy background processes going on?

BJ

That's a possibility - especially if you essentially turn the laptop on and make the call. You could perhaps test by giving it say 30 minutes to warm up in advance, or make a point of pausing windows updates before the call and see if that helps?

Another possibility is that Zoom may be assessing how well the laptop is coping, and progressively turn down resolution/image quality until it is no longer saturating the CPU? Is there an option to manually reduce image quality in Zoom in advance to see if that improves matters?

In general, video chat is probably the second most demanding activity computers are commonly used for (the most demanding is gaming) so it is where people will most often encounter a machine not being fast enough for what they are asking of it.

Every machine I look after for others that isn't used daily suffers from this and even my Gen 4 i5 16GB RAM SSD C drive main box does to a lesser extent - I've just downloaded some app updates from the MS store and the web surfing went very slow - mainly because of the hogging of network bandwidth rather then being CPU bound.

It is possible to edit how much network bandwidth background processes can use and using Metered Connection will stop automatic OS/app update downloads and trim the background telemetry volume going back to MS.