A/V sync and latency issues are as usual driving me insane. There's an opening for an amazing mobile app to be rewritten for dealing with this which apparently doesn't exist yet, here's how it would work: (thread)
The app has three modes: tick, tock, and calibrate. When it's in tick mode once a second it flashes a specific color light on its screen and makes a ticking sound. The tick sound should be high pitched and should be specific and the color should \
be a specific one. The details of what's best for those will be up to you, the engineer writing this thing. In the tock mode it has the camera on and waits for ticks to happen. When it hears and possibly sees a tick it calculates the offset between the light and sound for \
display and makes a tock response sound and color flash. That brings us back to the other thing the tick mode does, which is it calculates the round trip time for the tock sound to come in and displays that, along with the A/V sync offset of the tock.
For calibration you hold it up to a mirror and it runs both the tick and tock modes itself to calculate its own internal latencies so it knows to subtract those out.
The mere existence of this app would probably guilt trip the A/V world into getting their act together. People have no idea what the round trip time and A/V sync issues no their video conferencing software are. Once anyone can simply \
hold up phones on either end and be told how awful it is things might start to improve. It would also be an amazing since experiment. Sound travels at about a foot per millisecond, so it could reasonably accurately measure the distance of two phones in the same room.
Someone please write this. I ask for no cut or even credit, I just want it to exist so I can use it and video conferencing and playback starts sucking less.
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