What is the hardest part of adding video effects to your app?
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Hey everyone,
We’re curious to hear from people building products with video calls, recording, streaming, or live communication.
When adding video effects to an app, what is usually the hardest part?
For example:
performance across different devices
browser compatibility
mobile support
WebRTC integration
background segmentation quality
GPU/WebGL/WebGPU issues
keeping FPS stable
making the feature easy for end users
something else?
We’ve been working on Effects SDK for exactly these kinds of problems, so it would be really useful to hear what other teams struggle with most.
What has been the biggest challenge for you?
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Replies
@maxim_troshin Honestly the effect itself was rarely the hard part, device variance was. Something that hits 30fps on a dev laptop falls apart on a mid-range Android in a real call, and it gets worse the moment you're also encoding or streaming, the effect and the encoder end up fighting for the same GPU/CPU and FPS quietly drops. Keeping it stable on low-end mobile was the real work for us, not getting it working once. Curious what you're seeing on the segmentation-quality vs performance tradeoff?
Effects SDK
@nishant_06 That’s exactly the tradeoff we see. Better segmentation quality usually means a heavier model and more GPU or CPU load, which can reduce FPS.
On weaker devices, we generally prefer slightly rougher edges with stable real-time performance over perfect segmentation with frequent frame drops. At the same time, this isn’t always a strict either-or tradeoff: training smaller models and applying architectural optimizations can improve both sides, delivering better segmentation while requiring fewer inference resources.
That’s why we provide several presets and runtime metrics, so developers can choose the right balance or switch dynamically when the device is under pressure.
@maxim_troshin That dynamic switching under pressure is the smart part, most SDKs hand you presets and leave you to guess which one. One thing that bit us: reacting to already-dropped frames was too late, the user had seen the stutter by then. We ended up watching rolling FPS plus thermal state to downshift before it tanked, especially on longer calls where throttling kicks in a few minutes in even when the first 30 seconds were smooth. Are your runtime metrics exposing thermal/throttle signals, or mostly FPS and load? Proactive downshifting gets a lot easier if you can see the device heating up before the frames go.
Effects SDK
@nishant_06 That’s a very solid approach, especially for mobile apps. Android and iOS expose system-level thermal signals, so an application can combine them with rolling FPS and SDK performance metrics to downshift proactively before visible stuttering begins.
Our SDK currently exposes processing-level metrics such as FPS, inference time, and rendering time, but it doesn’t monitor thermal state or automatically disable effects. Thermal and system-pressure monitoring sits close to application behavior, platform APIs, and—in some cases—permissions or platform-specific restrictions, so we prefer to leave that control to the host application.
Different products may also require very different behavior. In some apps, an effect disappearing automatically may be unexpected or unacceptable, while others may prefer maintaining FPS at any cost. Developers should therefore have explicit control over whether to reduce quality, lower the processing frame rate, or disable selected effects.
Thermal throttling is also only one possible source of degradation. Video encoding, power-saving modes, OS scheduling, background processes, and competition for CPU or GPU resources can reduce performance even when the reported thermal state is still normal.
For browsers, the situation is more limited. There are APIs such as the Compute Pressure API, but availability varies between browsers and they expose only high-level pressure signals rather than precise thermal or hardware telemetry. On the web, combining rolling FPS with SDK inference and rendering metrics is usually the most practical approach.
@maxim_troshin Totally agree, keeping that policy in the host app is the right split. "Drop quality vs drop FPS vs kill the effect" is a product call, not an SDK one, and baking it in would just fight half your users. Clean processing metrics out of the SDK plus platform signals in the app is the right seam.
The tricky part app-side, once you're fusing SDK metrics + thermal + encoder state, is avoiding oscillation. Our first version flapped between presets every few seconds when a device sat right at the threshold. Hysteresis plus a short cooldown before upshifting fixed it, better to recover slowly than bounce. And to your encoder point, that was the nastiest one: thermal read normal but FPS still tanked because the encoder was starving the effect, so we treated sustained FPS drop as its own trigger regardless of thermal state.
Honestly this orchestration layer is the kind of thing I've spent a lot of time on app-side. If any of your devs ever want a hand wiring it up, glad to help. Either way this has been a genuinely good thread.