Audio and video quality

The video tech does a lot. The rest is physical setup. A 1080p session with good lighting, a real mic, and a wired internet connection looks and sounds completely different from the same software on a laptop in a dim room. What follows is the short list of things that actually move the needle — skip whatever feels obvious.

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Lighting

The biggest single improvement available, and most practitioners get it wrong on first try.

• Light should come from in front of you, not behind. A window or lamp behind your head puts your face in silhouette. The client sees a dark shape.
• A window in front of you is the best light source. Free, soft, flattering. Face the window. If you can’t, face a wall with a lamp on it.
• Avoid overhead fluorescent only. It puts shadows under your eyes and washes you out. Add a desk lamp at eye level pointing at your face.
• A cheap key light helps. $30 USB ring light or panel. Eye level, slightly off to the side. Don’t overdo brightness — the soft glow setting is what you want.

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Microphone

Laptop mics are passable. Anything else is better.

• Wired headset with a built-in mic is the cheapest meaningful upgrade. Apple EarPods with a Lightning or 3.5mm jack, the wired ones that came with your iPhone before AirPods existed. The mic is closer to your mouth than a laptop mic and the audio is significantly cleaner.
• A USB microphone (Blue Yeti, Shure MV5, Rode NT-USB, Samson Q2U) is the upgrade from there. ~$80–150. Sounds like a podcast.
• AirPods and other Bluetooth earbuds work, but they can drop audio quality during the call as the codec downgrades to compensate for background noise. Acceptable in a pinch, not first choice.
• Avoid built-in webcam mics on external monitors. They’re notoriously bad — pointing away from you, picking up keyboard noise, with no echo cancellation.

The mic level meter on the pre-join screen tells you whether the right mic is selected. If it’s not moving when you talk, the wrong mic is active.

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Internet

WebRTC video uses roughly 1–2.5 Mbps per stream in each direction. Most modern home internet can handle this without thinking. The two scenarios that cause problems:

• WiFi with poor signal. If you’re seeing one or two bars in your office, you’re on the edge of what WebRTC can sustain. Move closer to the router or run a session in a room with better signal.
• Sharing the connection with someone streaming or downloading. A household member starting a 4K stream during your session will cut your available bandwidth. Easiest fix: a wired ethernet connection. Most laptops accept a USB-C to ethernet adapter ($20).

If you do see “Connection lost” warnings during a session, internet is the first thing to suspect.

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Browser choice

Any modern browser works. There are real differences:

• Chrome (desktop) — the most-tested path. Best behavior across screen share, EMDR audio, and edge cases.
• Firefox (desktop) — solid. Slightly different screen-share picker UX, otherwise indistinguishable from Chrome.
• Safari (macOS) — works. Tighter security around microphone gestures (you have to tap once before the camera/mic enables), more conservative about background audio.
• Edge (desktop) — works. Same engine as Chrome under the hood, so expect identical behavior.
• Mobile Safari (iPhone, iPad) — works for sessions. Screen share is unreliable on mobile across all platforms; do clinical sharing from a desktop or laptop.
• Mobile Chrome (Android) — works. Same caveats as mobile Safari for screen share.

For clients, recommend whatever browser is already their default. They don’t need to install anything.

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Camera framing

A few small adjustments make a big difference:

• Camera at eye level. Stack books under your laptop, or use a proper webcam on a stand. Looking down into a laptop camera puts your client below you.
• Your head and shoulders should fill the frame. Don’t sit so far back that you’re a postage stamp. Closer than feels natural for a conversation tends to look right on video.
• Clean background. Not curated — clean. A wall, a bookshelf, a plant. Avoid your bed, dishes, or a window blasting sun behind you.

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Echo

The single most common audio complaint, and almost always fixable in under a minute. Echo happens when one side’s mic picks up the other side’s audio coming out of their own speakers. The other side then hears their own voice delayed by half a second. The fix:

• Use headphones. Any kind — wired earbuds, AirPods, headset. Headphones break the speaker-to-mic loop. Echo gone.
• Lower your speaker volume. Less audio coming out means less re-captured.
• Move farther from the speaker. Laptop speakers can echo at high volume; moving 18 inches back usually fixes it.

If the client is echoing back to you, ask them to put on headphones.

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What to do when something goes wrong mid-session

Video quality issues usually have one of three causes:

• One side’s internet is unstable → refresh both browsers, rejoin via the slug URL.
• The browser is overheating or low on memory → close other tabs and apps, refresh.
• Camera permission was revoked by an OS update or a paired Bluetooth device taking over → check browser permissions, restart the browser.

The general fallback: refresh the tab, rejoin the URL. WebRTC connections are stateless on your side — a refresh re-establishes them clean.

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What Rivet does automatically when the connection degrades

Rivet runs a quality monitor every two seconds during a call. When the network can’t sustain video at acceptable quality, the system steps through three levels of degradation in order, always preserving audio:

1. Step down video bitrate and resolution (silent — you’ll see a slight softening of the other person’s image but nothing alarming)
2. Step down further to a 640×360 baseline (still silent — most people don’t notice)
3. Audio-first mode — when packet loss stays above 8% for 6 seconds and Rivet has already shed all video quality it can, your outbound video pauses entirely. A small banner appears at the top of your screen: “Audio only — video paused, weak connection.” Your audio keeps going. The other side sees your last frame frozen.

When the connection clears (under 5% loss for 30 seconds), video automatically resumes. You don’t have to do anything. Why audio-first: in therapy specifically, the conversation matters more than the visual. A frozen video on a client mid-disclosure is far less disruptive than the call dropping. Audio is the irreducible minimum. If you’d rather stay on video and accept the quality loss, just keep the camera button on — Rivet honours your camera button as a hard preference. If you turn the camera off yourself while in audio-only mode, Rivet won’t re-enable it when the connection recovers; you stay in whatever state you chose. For the full list of banners and prompts you might see during a degraded call — Reconnecting…, Other person disconnected, Audio only, the Rejoin call button — see the connection-state guide. That page is the single reference for what each one means and what to do about it.

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