This article outlines how to achieve the best video quality and performance when using Bevy Virtual Meetup. To learn more about the list of new features, please see here

Tips for the best video call experience

Most common problems with video calls can be solved in a couple of steps. For the best video call experience, we highly recommend you do the following before a call:

• Test your camera and mic
• Use an updated browser, preferably Chrome
• Check that your browser has access to your camera and mic
• Connect to a stable network, preferably through an Ethernet cable, especially if you are using an older device 
  (We find Wi-Fi often causes issues, even on home networks.)
• Use headphones or a headset to prevent background noise and audio feedback
• HOT TIP: Restart your machine before going onto a call – this releases your camera and mic from other apps that can prevent it from being used on the call.

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.

Connection

Your experience using Bevy Virtual Meetup depends upon your internet connection and device, and video quality will vary across attendees. Bevy scales the video up or down according to the strength of your internet and device.

With strong internet and device, you'll enjoy a seamless connection. However, if either is weak, Bevy may:

• Temporarily turn off your video.
• Turn off videos of speakers or other attendees, but you might still hear them.

Factors such as VPN or Countries with limited access also play a role in your connection quality

To find your Connection Status:

• Click on Help
• You'll see 4 items as well as a quality score
• 

Connection Status explained

1. The first number shows your video sending kilobytes per second. This will only show if you area  presenter. Attendees will have 0
2. The second will show your video received kilobits per second, this applies to anyone on the call
3. The 3rd shows your packet loss for sending data (only applicable to presenters)
4. the last shows packet loss received (applies to all)
5. Quality, shows your average quality score for the last 7 minutes
   • Anything above 50% is acceptable 

If your connection Status is poor

• Click Help
• Select Test Network

This will take you to the network test page, be sure to get through all 6 options listed at the bottom of the page to fully test your system and find out where the faults could be

If you can't join the event, you can test the network directly from the Haircheck screen, by clicking on the Help button and "Test network" or by going to https://daily-precall.vercel.app/video-check :

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.