Webcam quality, VM's and Thin Clients

[MmillerTech]

Hello,

We have been struggling with camera quality in our virtual environment. It seems that no matter what we do, quality of a webcam ends up very choppy and pixelated. After a fair amount of research, we came to the conclusion that it is best to run cameras on Thin Clients, as opposed to Zero Clients. Still, when logged into a virtual machine, there is no improvement to the quality of the picture when run on a Thin Client.

While most of our environment is running PCoIP, we have also tested with BLAST. RTAV is another avenue that we've explored. We are running nVidia Grid cards, and have plenty or resources to put toward video quality (graphic intensive programs such as AutoCAD, Photoshop and BlueBeam work just fine). What's alarming to me is that, no matter what we test (RTAV, BLAST, Thin/Zero Client, PCoIP, etc...), there is absolutely no change, negative or positive, in camera quality.

I am also confused about the benefits of using a Thin Client. I was told early on that running a camera from a Thin Client allows the video to be processed locally before passing through to the VDI. My understanding is that a Thin Client is nothing more than a PC running the Horizon View Client (or Citrix, RDP, etc...), but did find recently that there are RTAV settings in the registry of our 10zig Thin Clients. I'm just wondering if there is something that needs to be done on the Client itself in order to utilize RTAV in the virtual environment.

My suspicion is that we HAVE the tools we need, but are missing some critical information on how to use them. I apologize for the lack of information/context... I'm not sure I know the VDI lingo well enough to communicate a question like this. I'm hoping that someone can offer some advice based on similar experiences. We NEED to give our users acceptable camera quality, and they do not want to take extra steps to leave their virtual machine to do so.

Currently running:

nVidia GRID (M and K series)

VMWare Agent version 7.4

Logitech 1080p cameras

10Zig 5800/5900 Thin and Zero Clients

Thanks!

Michael

[BenFB]

Traditional zero clients do not support RTAV and it can only be used with thin clients that support it or with the Horizon Client. By default with RTAV the webcam will be restricted to 320 x 240 and 15 frames per second. You can increase this up to a maximum of 1920 x 1080 and 25 frames per second but it comes at a cost of resources. It's all about finding the right balance.

Guidelines for Using Real-Time Audio-Video with 3rd-Party Applications on Horizon View Desktops (205...

Setting Frame Rates and Resolution for Real-Time Audio-Video on Horizon View Clients (2053644)

[smccreadie]

Hello Michael,

Were you able to make any progress with improving your user experience with webcams?

We are in a similar position.  We have all zero clients (teradici) and are in the POC process with a few Thin clients.  (including the 10zig NOS)

Do you have any recommendations?

Thank you in advance.

Sean

[VMHero4Ever]

Hi guys,

we are struggling at the moment with the same issue.
RTAV with windows horizon clients works great. We increased the camera quality via group policy already to 1280x720 @ 19fps.

But we have also a lot of traditional tera2 zeroclients. We connected a logitech C925e usb webcam to the front usb ports. In the vdi we can see this device but the resolution is limited to 640x480. We want to set this a little bit higher but didn't find any way how I can do that. I can only choose lower resolutions.

Regards,
VM-Master

[Fixitup77]

Hello guys,

I as well am having the same type of issues. No matter what I set the group policy to with the administrative templates for RTAV, I am only getting 240x320 resolution from the webcam. Trying to find a happy medium but not having any luck. The changes in the GPO seem to have no effect.

Running

VMWare Agent version 7.7

Logitech 1080p cameras

10Zig 5800 Zero Clients

Thanks

[VMHero4Ever]

I opened for few weeks a ticket at teradici. But they don't want to help me because we don't have an active maintenance subscription.

We don't have this issue with our windows horizon clients and also not with our new IGEL thinclients.

So I am sure that these old teradici clients are unable to set a higher resolution. These teradici clients don't use RTAV. it's usb bridging.

We will kick off all our teradici devices in the next year and switch over to IGEL with Horizon blast.

[NickTT]

Fixitup77,

Are you sure the policy is being applied? It's possible the settings are configured in more than one GPO and is getting overwritten by another policy. I set our to 640x480 and it's working just fine. Double check your GPO Policy order on the OU and make sure the one with your settings is on top. Also run RSOP.MSC on your machine to make sure it's applied. The Policy is under"VMware View Agent Configuration/View RTAV Configuration/View RTAV Webcam Settings" for those that haven't found it yet.

You will also want to look at:

"VMware View Agent Configuration/VMware HTML5 Features/VMware WebRTC Redirection Features" and Enable Media Optimization for Microsoft Teams.

The other thing is to check your agent install string and that RTAV was even enabled. This is the install string I am using with the new 2006 agent...

VMware-Horizon-Agent-x86_64-8.0.0-16530789.exe /s /norestart /v"/qn REBOOT=ReallySuppress VDM_VC_MANAGED_AGENT=1 RDP_CHOICE=1 INSTALL_VDISPLAY_DRIVER=1 ADDLOCAL=Core,USB,RDSH3D,NGVC,VmwVaudio,VmVideo,RTAV,ClientDriveRedirection,SerialPortRedirection,ScannerRedirection,GEOREDIR,SmartCard,TSMMR,VMWMediaProviderProxy,PerfTracker,PrintRedir,PSG,HelpDesk"

Note the RTAV in the feature list.

We have defaulted all our systems to BLAST. We defined the Pools to BLAST and don't give people the option to change it. It's helped with our AV\Meeting apps but I am still struggling on other aspects.

You can see my post HERE​

Also note that we stopped using the Zero Clients are went with Dell Micros as TCs. So my environment might behave a little different from yours.

[Endpoint2020]

Hi Fixitup77​

Have you spoken to our Tech Team about this?

You can get them here - https://www.10zig.com/contact

I'm not Technical but if you can let them know your firmware version and local RTAV settings they should be able to help.

Thanks - TD