Focus Video Settings and What They Mean

• Best quality and reliability - Best option to use for feeds with higher bitrates.
• It works in scenarios where you don’t have a network connection and want to capture live using a BM directly going into Focus server.
• The user can manually introduce a delay which is useful for certain use cases.

• The feed is not as ‘’live’’ as the live stream.

Streaming - No Buffering 
 

No buffering essentially means that the user is instructing the Focus client to directly access the stream.

• Lowest possible latency.

• Possibility of glitches if the network fluctuates (e.g. dropped frames, stuttering).
• Poor user experience if there are temporary bandwidth drops.

Streaming - With Buffering 
 

This setting instructs the Focus client to access the live stream directly with a small delay.

• Smoother playback - buffering absorbs small network problems.
• More resilient to temporary network drops or jitter. Higher perceived quality (fewer visible freezes or artifacts).

• Added delay (buffer might introduce a small delay).
• Not as live as ‘’streaming without buffering’’ but still reliable and close to the actual action.
• Still vulnerable to major connection loss.

This setting means that the client will play the local recordings if they exist, otherwise the client falls back to the server recording, if it can access it. 

It is recommended that this setting be enabled when capturing live.

This setting will instruct the client to transcode exports. Enabling this setting will impact the following:

• Exporting sessions
• Anything that’s uploaded to the hub

It won’t impact the following:

• Exporting tag clips (transcode option available on the export tag clips menu)
• Exporting presentations as packages

Controls how the software smooths video when you zoom in (magnify) beyond the original resolution. 

Toggling the setting tells the system how to generate the “new” pixels when zooming in - either simply copy nearby pixels or interpolate (guess and smooth between pixels).

Deinterlacing is the process of converting interlaced video (common in older broadcasts and some camera feeds) into progressive video (full frames) - 1080i > 1080p.

When enabled, it forces the software to deinterlace all incoming video - even if the source doesn’t explicitly tell the software it’s interlaced.

Buffered playback allows Focus to accurately synchronize audio/video with the timeline and may also provide smoother playback generally on some machines. 

Although there may be a slight delay when the video plays. 

When you might need to interact with this setting: 

Glitchy/Bad video playback on archive sessions (offline) - It might be useful to enable this setting and check if it improves video playback performance.

Preferred hardware-accelerated decoding uses the computer's GPU instead of the CPU to decode video streams, reducing system load and improving playback performance. If supported, it ensures smoother streaming and playback, especially for high-resolution videos. 

Enabled → Tries to offload video decoding to hardware (GPU/video engine) 
Disabled → Forces the CPU to do all the decoding work manually (software decoding) 

When you might need to interact with this setting:

Black screen (with/without a spinning circle on Focus, usually seen on Apple silicon devices). Disabling this setting might resolve the video playback issue.