Activity:

How to enable HD settings in MS Teams

Operating System:

Windows, MacOS, Linux

Steps:

MS Teams automatically optimizing your video quality based on specific criteria, including bandwidth. Here is some information on how to ensure your environment supports HD video through MS Teams

1. To understand how MS Teams supports HD Audio & Video, click on this article published by Microsoft. This primarily focuses on the network.
2. Read below for some quick tips on how to optimize your workstation to remove obstacles that would prevent HD streaming:
   1. Check your computer to see if it is running at maximum capacity. If you are using up all your memory, you may see slow processing in MS Teams as well as other software. You may need to free up some space to improve performance
   2. Optimize your networks. 
      1. Use a direct ethernet connection if possible.
      2. If using Wifi:
         1. Plan and optimize the WiFi bands and access point placement. 
         2. For dual-band WiFi networks, consider implementing band steering.
         3. Ensure that access points that are next to each other are on channels that don’t overlap.
   3. You may need to review your settings and disable (or enable) GPU hardware acceleration. You can do this within MS Teams by following these steps:
      1. Open Microsoft Teams. 
      2. Click on your profile photo and then click on Settings.
      3. Under application select Disable GPU hardware acceleration. (requires restarting Teams)
      4. Close the Microsoft Teams. Please not that clicking on the X at the top will not completely close the app, it will just minimize it to the taskbar. Instead, you will need to right-click on the system tray icon and select Quit
      5. Open Microsoft Teams and check if the problem persists.