WhatsApp is enhancing its video calling experience across desktop and mobile devices with a range of improvements over the next few weeks, the Meta-owned messaging app said on June 13.
As part of these updates, WhatsApp will now allow users to share their audio while sharing their screen, making it ideal for people to watch videos together on a call, the company said.
WhatsApp had introduced screen-sharing support for video calls in August 2023.
WhatsApp is also increasing the limit of participants on a group video call on desktop to 32 people, bringing it on par with its mobile apps. Prior to this, people could add up to 8 people on its Windows and Mac apps.
With this update, WhatsApp said that users can now have up to 32 people on a video call across all their devices.
Another key addition is 'Speaker Spotlight' that automatically highlights the person talking on the video call and makes them appear first on the screen.
WhatsApp parent Meta also said that it recently launched Meta Low (MLow) Bitrate audio codec to improve the reliability of calls and audio quality even on poor networks. Prior to this, Meta used an open-source codec Opus that was released in 2012.
Read: WhatsApp rolls out chat filters to help users find messages easily
Meta said that the launch of MLow comes after nearly two years of active development and testing. The company claims that the codec offers two-times-better quality than Opus while keeping its computational complexity 10 percent lower than that of Opus.
With MLow, calls made on mobile devices will have improved noise and echo cancellation, making it easier for people to make calls in noisy environments. Audio will also be crisper overall, even if the user is facing poor network connectivity or is using an older device, the company said.
Users with faster connections will also have higher resolution in video calls. Meta said that MLow has already been made available for all Instagram and Messenger calls and the company is now actively rolling it out on WhatsApp.
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