Introducing: in-call Meeting Diagnostics

At Whereby, we’re continuously at work to improve the quality of your video calling sessions, be it through our Whereby Meetings product, or our telehealth-focused Whereby Embedded offering.

Over the last year, we’ve been making numerous tweaks to our media library, signal implementation, and media router infrastructure in order to ensure a seamless and high-quality experience, even in challenging circumstances with poor connectivity.

Now, we are excited to introduce a new feature that will give you greater insight into your meeting performance.

Introducing the Meeting Diagnostics panel

Understanding what’s happening during your video calls is crucial for maintaining a smooth and productive meeting. Our all new Meeting Diagnostics panel provides a detailed overview of your meeting’s quality during an ongoing call. You can easily access this feature while in a video call, by clicking on the antenna bars button 📶 in the top right corner. Once opened, the panel will display key metrics, including "Audio transmission," "Video transmission," and "CPU usage," to help you diagnose and address any potential issues.

Real-time view of transmission quality

The audio and video transmission graphs are designed to give you real-time feedback on the quality of your own outgoing audio and video. These graphs will turn yellow or red if we detect any bandwidth issues that could negatively affect your outgoing audio or video streams. This allows you to quickly identify and troubleshoot problems, ensuring that your meetings remain clear and uninterrupted: when you start seeing yellow or red bars, you could for instance move to a different location with better reception, or switch networks to improve the situation.

It's also worth pointing out here that, when your Meeting Diagnostics panel highlights potential connectivity issues, other participants in the call will see a colored antenna bars icon on your tile: this makes it more clear who in the call is having connectivity challenges, and hopefully helps with resolving the problem faster.

Leveraging the brand new Compute Pressure API for CPU monitoring

A standout feature of the new panel is the CPU usage graph, powered by the cutting-edge Compute Pressure API, which we've been happy to test ahead of its official release through Chrome's Origin Trial program. Pioneered by Intel and now shipping in Chrome 124 and later (+ other Chromium-powered browsers) on desktop, this API allows us to provide accurate visualisation of your system’s “compute” load. We’ve included this graph because we’ve found that many reported quality issues in video calling scenarios are actually caused by overloaded CPUs.

Even if you’re in a place with good network coverage, your calling quality might be affected if your computer is performing other tasks in the background. When you notice your CPU usage is high, you can try closing other browser tabs and applications running heavy workloads on your computer, and the CPU usage graph should become green again.

Looking ahead

This diagnostics panel is just the first phase of a larger project. We have ambitious plans to further enhance this tool, offering users more options to manage their bandwidth usage and maintain a high-quality meeting experience. One feature we’re exploring is an audio-only mode, which will allow you to partake in a video meeting with others, without receiving their video streams, allowing you to preserve bandwidth. We’re still testing this, and expect to roll it out over the coming months.

We hope you find these new features helpful in making your video conferencing more reliable and efficient. At Whereby, we’re committed to providing you with the best video calling experience, and we look forward to bringing you more exciting updates soon.