Why are most screen sharing sessions conducted at low frame rate?

11 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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A short transcript of a technical discussion (YouTube) explaining why screen sharing sessions are often run at low frame rates. Speakers note that many users have high-resolution (4K) monitors which create a much larger screen area to encode than a webcam feed; encoding that larger area demands more CPU. For slide/static content they often reduce frame rate to save CPU while preserving resolution so text remains readable (examples: talking heads at ~720p/30fps; presenters may accept downscaling webcams to 480p but not shrink slide text).

Questions this video answers

720p at 30fps.

4K monitors.

Reducing from 720p to 480p.

Chapters

Why are most screen sharing sessions conducted at a low frame rate?
So if we're saying low frame rate, what we do typically for talking heads is hopefully 720p at 30fps. But the problem with screen sharing is that we often have 4K monitors, which means four times the size of. No. Even more than much. A much larger screen area than you have for talking head video.
Yes.
Which means much more CPU required to encode.
Yes.
And the compromise we often make is for slides. We don't really need that. So we're just going to reduce the frame rate.
So if you notice what we're currently actually recording of WebRTC, that that part of the screen sharing over there is like it's static. Nothing moves there. So a low frame rate makes sense while we move more. But our webcams are usually at 720p, 1080p, which is a lot smaller than an actual screen size. Now, the other thing is that I don't care if you squeeze me a bit in resolution and move from 720p to 480 video or whatever, because we're fine with that. But if you change that text over there and make it smaller and ugly, that's not going to work. Especially if the fonts were smaller and there was a lot more text in this specific slide.
Yes.
Okay, so we use lower frame rate because the resolution is higher and want to maintain that resolution to be able to read from the screen.
Correct.