TechNote (Archived)

Best practices for screen sharing

While the real-time Breeze Meetings render well across connected users, Presenters should have a minimum continuous bandwidth of 350K to ensure proper recording of the Meeting. This bandwidth requirement is necessary to avoid synchronization issues between audio and visual portions of the recording.

Once a meeting has been recorded, there is nothing that can be done to correct any synchronization issues that occur, but there are several steps that can be taken on the client side to help ensure the best possible recording. Here is a list of several client side settings that Presenters can use to help minimize the amount of bandwidth used during a recording.

**Share specific Applications or Windows instead of the Desktop.**

This presents less of a processing and bandwidth burden and will improve screen resolution conflicts with other connected users. Sharing a single Window is the best option in terms of speed.

Color changes in the background will use more bandwidth.

Every time a screen changes, it causes an increase in the amount of bandwidth used. If you switch from one brightly colored screen to another, it requires more bandwidth and may cause synchronization issues. If you have a complex image as your desktop background, change the background to a standard flat color such as blue to minimize the amount of bandwidth used.

Reduce the amount of color gradients on your desktop title bar.

Although a small area, one thing you can do to further reduce bandwidth usage is to reduce the color gradients in your title bars. You can do this by following the directions below:

Click the Start menu.
Select Control Panel > Display.
Click the Appearance tab.
Click Advanced.
Locate the Item pop-up menu.
Select Active Title bar.
Set the Color and Color 2 to the same color.
Select the Inactive Title bar.
Set the Color and Color 2 to the same color.

Change your desktop theme from Windows XP view to Windows Classic view.

Windows XP Theme on your desktop uses a higher amount of colors. If you switch to Windows Classic Theme view, it decreases the amount of colors used and therefore reduce the amount of bandwidth used during the recording. To change to Windows Classic theme, follow the directions below:

Right-click on your desktop and select Properties.
Under theme, select Windows Classic.

Check the following TechNote for Breeze Live Bandwidth Calculation Information:

Breeze Live Bandwidth Calculation Information

Depending on the type of recording that you are doing, you may want to consider using Adobe Captivate to make recordings.

If you're not familiar with Adobe Captivate, you can find out more atwww.adobe.com/software/captivate.

Adobe Captivate allows you to create editable software demonstrations and simulations and does not require a continuous internet connection to make the recordings. It also integrates very easily with Breeze, so you can record your content and publish it to a Breeze server.