Higer resolution and/or bitrate for streaming coming soon?

[vrwanter]

Has anyone seen any kind of ETA on when we can use a higher bit rate and/or resolution for streaming?

This comes up a fair bit, but I haven't seen any official responses as to whether or not it's actually even going to happen - did I miss something?

[HackPerception]

@vrwanter I'll work to try and drive better messaging out about this when team members return from the weekend.

That said, I doubt we'd share a very solid public ETA if we confirm changes are being worked on - Taipei is still in total lockdown and not having the office infrastructure is definitely having an impact on that team.

[vrwanter]

Thanks HackPerception - it would be great to get a coming soon, or could be several months or something - even if it's vague it would be great to have some idea.

I didn't realise Taipei was in lockdown - sorry to hear that.

[vrwanter]

On a side note - I can't believe I typo'd 'Higher' in the title lol

[vrwanter]

On 8/14/2021 at 6:24 AM, HackPerception said:

@vrwanter I'll work to try and drive better messaging out about this when team members return from the weekend.

Any chance of up update on this? Looking forward to some extra crispness and quality with streaming.

[HackPerception]

The current focus of the VBS team is improving core stability, overall UX, and fixing known issues.

Past 100mbps, there are stability issues that are going to take some time to work through to create a stable public release. Some are addressable on our side, while others are  WiFi limitations that we have to develop solutions to counteract.

The way it was described to me is that higher bandwidth isn't one discrete feature request, but is actually requires dozens of smaller optimizations, fixes, and feature requests scattered throughout the product in order to hit a stable release pathway. It's a ladder of progression towards that goal rather than a straight line.

That team is actively working to further develop and improve the overall VBS platform - and that work will hopefully pave the way for higher bandwidth and improve overall greater stability/usability. VBS is only a few months old - it's still early days and we're certainly still investing into developing it. While you might not see an update in the immediate short-term that enables higher bandwidth, the updates that you do see in the mean time will improve quality and stability in other ways and pave the way.

That said, there are physical limits to modern WiFi and it's likely never going to fully match a higher quality, VR-specific USB-C cable.

[vrwanter]

Ok, thanks for the info. Still, can't wait to see it 🙂

[ShadowBrain]

On 9/8/2021 at 1:42 AM, HackPerception said:

The current focus of the VBS team is improving core stability, overall UX, and fixing known issues.

Past 100mbps, there are stability issues that are going to take some time to work through to create a stable public release. Some are addressable on our side, while others are  WiFi limitations that we have to develop solutions to counteract.

The way it was described to me is that higher bandwidth isn't one discrete feature request, but is actually requires dozens of smaller optimizations, fixes, and feature requests scattered throughout the product in order to hit a stable release pathway. It's a ladder of progression towards that goal rather than a straight line.

That team is actively working to further develop and improve the overall VBS platform - and that work will hopefully pave the way for higher bandwidth and improve overall greater stability/usability. VBS is only a few months old - it's still early days and we're certainly still investing into developing it. While you might not see an update in the immediate short-term that enables higher bandwidth, the updates that you do see in the mean time will improve quality and stability in other ways and pave the way.

That said, there are physical limits to modern WiFi and it's likely never going to fully match a higher quality, VR-specific USB-C cable.

Fair enough. I think people are expecting something more in line with Virtual Desktop which can push over 2500x2500 per eye on Quest 2 and set its bitrate to 866mbps or even higher.

I don't think anyone expects it to match USB quality or latency, but I feel like you can get a lot more quality out of wifi than you're currently getting, since you've seemingly arbitrarily maxed it out at 100mbps and 2048x2048 per eye...

Eagerly awaiting updates. 🙂

Edited September 13, 2021 by ShadowBrain

[jefmes]

And to jump on ShadowBrain's comment there - if HTC's main concerns are around improving that bitrate over wifi, what about splitting the bitrate options for USB and wifi connections? I'm happy to hear long term there is work being done to improve the overall performance of wifi streaming (I can't even get wifi streaming working again right now on Windows 11 for some reason) but I think many of us would be happy to see the USB streaming options unlocked a bit more. I have to imagine the streaming limitations over USB-C could be raised much more easily.