Microsoft has been working on changes on Teams from June to the end of 2020. These improvements include optimizing the video renderer and recording.
Microsoft announced that it had reduced the power requirements for Microsoft Teams by 50 percent in meetings and calls since June of 2020.
In a blog article earlier this week, Robert Aichner, a principal group program manager at Microsoft, explained the optimization methods used to reduce power usage.
He stated it was because “the ubiquity of Teams” led the firm to “create equitable experiences” for every user, regardless of the technology level or low-tech of their devices.
Microsoft Teams has become a widely used tool for workers who work from home and in hybrid settings during the epidemic, and the company has seen an increase in users. Microsoft said Teams had exceeded 270 million daily active members in the last financial announcement.
“One of the factors we’ve addressed is the difference in power requirements for different customer profiles by ensuring Teams’ meetings are as energy efficient as possible, regardless of set-up,” Aichner explained.
A reduction of 50 percent in consumption was observed in power-intensive situations like when there are more than ten people in Teams meetings with video.
Aichner explained that Microsoft began by developing a test framework to precisely evaluate the power consumption of situations like group video calls and screen sharing. They typically involve “energy-intensive processes” such as recording, encoding, and rendering.
The team was able to isolate and optimize the processes to boost efficiency. It started by optimizing the camera during the video capture process to decrease the processor’s load.
Then, it moved to video rendering, which made improvements to the processing of multiple video streams during conference calls by merging the streams into one video.
Aichner stated that additional screen-sharing optimizations are planned for later in the year. In addition, the team will be evaluating each proposed Teams function to “ensure existing processing efficiencies are not compromised.”
“Looking forward, we’ll continue to work closely with CPU and GPU chipset vendors to ensure the next generation of silicon is further optimized for Teams video conferencing,” Aichner said.
