This article explains what affects video and audio quality in Bevy Virtual Meetup, how to check your connection during a session, and how to allow Bevy's video traffic through a firewall or VPN.

Bevy Virtual Meetup runs in your browser. Video and audio quality depend on your network and device. Allow Bevy's video traffic through your firewall or virtual private network (VPN), and use Google Chrome when you can.

Before you join

A few steps can help you avoid quality problems before a session starts:

• Test your camera and microphone.
• Use an up-to-date browser. Google Chrome is recommended.
• Confirm your browser can use your camera and microphone.
• Use a stable network. A wired Ethernet connection is more reliable than Wi-Fi, especially on older devices.
• Use headphones or a headset to cut background noise and echo.
• Restart your computer before the event, so other apps are not holding your camera or microphone.

Recommended browser

Use the table below to make sure you're using a recommended browser:

Other browsers such as Brave, Arc, and other Chromium-based browsers should work but may have unknown issues, please switch to Chrome if you do experience issues and check your internet connection.

Check your connection during a session

Quality varies by attendee. Bevy scales video up or down to match your internet connection and device. On a weak connection, Bevy may temporarily turn off your camera, or turn off other people's video while you can still hear them. A VPN or a restricted country network can also reduce quality.

To read your connection status during a session:

1. Select Help.
2. Review the four metrics and the quality score:
   • Video send (kilobits per second) — presenters only. Attendees show 0.
   • Video receive (kilobits per second) — everyone.
   • Packet loss while sending — presenters only.
   • Packet loss while receiving — everyone.
   • Quality — an average score for the last 7 minutes. Above 50% is acceptable.

If the score is poor:

1. Select Help, then Test network.
2. Complete all six checks on the test page.

If quality is still poor after that, try relay mode. Select Help, then Use relay connection, to route your call through an alternate network path — useful if you're on a VPN, a corporate firewall, or a restrictive Wi-Fi network. See Fix connection issues in live events with relay mode.

Device performance

Bevy Virtual Meetup operates within a browser, not as a desktop app (like Zoom)

Several factors can impact browser performance, including:

• Tabs running in the background.
• Browser extensions that may affect the device's or internet connection.
• Other active computer apps.
• Hardware, especially on older laptops, in busy video sessions.
• Effects (burred backgrounds and virtual wallpapers) on the video can have a negative impact on performance. They required greater processing power.

Hostname and ports whitelist for Bevy Virtual

To use the Bevy Virtual service, you need to make sure that your VPN and firewall settings allow you to connect to the platform that powers the video and audio features of Bevy Virtual. It uses different domains and ports for different purposes, such as signaling, media, and web resources. You need to allow all of these domains and ports in your VPN and firewall settings, or you may experience connection issues or poor quality.

The main domain that you have to allow is *.daily.co. This domain is used for various fallback connection types, so you should make sure that you can access it on port 443. If you are using a corporate VPN, you may need to configure it as a split-tunnel, which means that you can access *.daily.co without going through the VPN.

If you are unable to allow *.daily.co. You have to allow the following domains as minimum, which are used for specific purposes:

• https://bevy.daily.co specific subaccount for Bevy
• https://b.daily.co and https://c.daily.co: These domains are used for JavaScript, images, sounds, and fonts that are needed for the web interface of Bevy Virtual.
• https://gs.daily.co: This domain is used for room status updates, such as who is in the room and what devices they are using.
• *.wss.daily.co: These domains are used for SFU media connections, which are the servers that handle the video and audio streams. You need to be able to open a WebSocket connection to these domains, which usually look like an AWS IP, such as "ip-172-31-10-133-ec2.wss.daily.co".
• prod-ks.pluot.blue: This domain is used for ICE negotiation, which is a process that helps establish the best connection between the participants.

If you have a firewall, you should allow UDP hole punching, which is the standard way of allowing peer-to-peer connections through the firewall. If you are blocking or allowing specific UDP ports, you should open port 3478 for signaling and media tunneling, and UDP ports 40000-65534 for all hosts for peer-to-peer calls.

If you have a network appliance that provides threat-based IP allowlisting/blocklisting, such as Cisco Talos, you may encounter some connection issues occasionally because the services use Amazon public cloud resources, and some of the IPs may be on the blocklist. If this happens, you may need to update your blocklist.

If your network tools don’t allow for whitelisting wildcard hostnames, you can get the full list of IPs for all hostnames from the IP list. The "sfu" key includes IPs for *.wss.daily.co call servers. The "web" key includes the IPs for web requests (all the daily.co and pluot.blue subdomains). It also includes the protocol and port to whitelist in each.

Use the Connection Check tool to verify if everything is working as expected.

Configuring VPN split tunnel

If you have a VPN, Bevy Virtual calls will have much better quality if you can configure the traffic to bypass it. You can usually do that by configuring split tunneling. You'll at least want to exempt port 443 for the Twilio IP ranges  and for Xirsys IPs. If you can exempt UDP traffic altogether, that's even better.

After you change firewall rules, use Daily's connection check tool to confirm the change worked.

If you can't get these hosts allowlisted — for example, on a network you don't control — relay mode offers a workaround. See Fix connection issues in live events with relay mode.