Call Quality Improvements

H.264 logoWe are excited to announce an update to Gruveo that introduces significant improvements to the call picture quality. These improvements have been made possible by dumping the old Sorenson Spark codec used for compressing video and replacing it with the newer H.264.

H.264 is a state of the art codec that offers better video at drastically lower bitrates. Using H.264 allowed us to slash Gruveo’s bandwidth requirements almost in half while offering better picture quality. These quality improvements will be even more pronounced on slower connections.

H.264 is more CPU intensive than the old codec, which may become noticeable on older computers. However, most computers these days have no problem processing H.264, and we feel that the gains in call quality are well worth the switch.

Finally, H.264 encoding is supported by Flash version 11.0 and later, so Gruveo’s required minimum Flash version has been bumped from 10.3 to 11.0. That shouldn’t be an issue for most of our users because less than 1% of them have older versions of the Flash plugin installed. If you have an old version of Flash, please upgrade – it’s totally free.

Try the new Gruveo today and let us know what you think in the comments below!