Lifesize Announces Icon 700 4K Video Conference End-Point

Lifesize has once again made a splash, announcing the Icon 700, their first 4K-capable video conference end-point.


They’re taking pre-orders for the device, which marries a 4K PTZ camera with a 20x zoom lens, with the ability to drive dual, 4K displays. Thus it delivers 4K participant video and 4K full-motion shared content at each location.


Lifesize must be quite excited since the announcement happened even before they had marketing support for the device. Lacking for a spec sheet, I posed a couple of questions to their sales team. They report the device as leveraging H.264 baseline or high profile, with H.265 on the road map. Further, that 4k30 video requires 3 Mbps for each stream.

Yesterday they finally released a proper spec sheet from which we learn:

  • The device is SIP capable (no surprise there.)
  • Maximum 83 degree field of view.
  • Gigabit Ethernet.
  • 10 camera presets (near or far end.)
  • Dedicated RJ for the Lifesize phone provides power to the phone via POE.
  • Audio codec support includes; Opus, G.722.1, G.722, G.711 and Siren 7.

I’m a big fan of dog-fooding. That’s actually using the tech that’s being pitched. So I was happy to see that the promo video used in the launch of the Icon 700 are actually produced in 4K.

Lifesize began as a manufacturer of end-points and MCUs. They were founded by Craig Malloy, General Manager of Polycom’s Video Communication Division, who was frustrated at how slowly Polycom was moving into HD video conferencing.

In 2015 they made a major pivot from being a maker of traditional, installed MCU hardware to offering their MCU back-end as a cloud service.

This is NOT the first that I’ve heard of 4K video conferencing, but it is the first time I’ve seen a 4K-capable end-point appliance with a real PTZ camera. The Icon 700 lists for $7,500 USD.

El Gato CamLink: Now in 4K


The new 4K models appears identical to the older model, but now accommodates 4k30 sources. It’s listed direct from Corsair for $129. At present it shown on Amazon for a whopping $249. That’s surely a launch-time anomaly.

There’s still no on-board scaling or compression, so my earlier observations still hold true. If it does what you need, it’s a nice, low-cost way to capture video.

For some folks,  it simply won’t do what they need. Those folks are better served by capture devices from Magewell or Yuan. Those companies offer more capable, and most costly, 1080p and 4K capture devices.

When can USB 2.0 actually be better than USB 3.0? Video Capture!

This has come up a lot recently and it’s a little counter-intuitive. There are times when an older video capture device, using USB 2.0, is actually better than new new one that leverages faster USB 3.0 or 3.1. The reason is simple, but not obvious.

Just a few years ago, USB-attached video devices had to cope with the constraints of USB 2.0 (480 mbps) so they often incorporated on-board scaling and compression engines. Remember that using uncompressed video USB 2.0 maxes out at 720p30. This is why that was, and remains, the de facto standard for video chat applications.

Their newer kin, with a faster USB 3.0 (5 Gbps) connection to the host, can pass an uncompressed 1080p60 video stream…so they usually don’t have as much on-board processing capability.

Consider as an example the El Gato family of HD60, HD60S and Cam Link USB capture devices. The first two of these devices look very similar, but the differences are substantial and potentially important.

El Gato HD60

We used an HD60 at Cluecon 2017 when we needed a last minute way to ingest an HDMI source into a computer. It worked really well. It has a USB 2 connection to the host. It could deliver YUY2 uncompressed up to 720p30. It could deliver 1080p30 using MJPEG or H264 compression. MJPEG has zero latency, so this is the preferred way to accommodate 1080p over a USB2 link. The UVC 1.1 standard, circa 2005, indicates as much.

While conceptually it was a UVC compliant device, the HD60 has a device-specific installable driver. This driver was installed with the El Gato Game Capture utility, which we used to verify the correct operation of the device.

El Gato HD60S

The newer HD60S looks so very similar. The primary difference being the USB 3 Type-C connection to the host. USB-C ports still being less common, many people would likely use a type-C to type-A cable to connect it to a USB 3.0 port.

The HD60S is capable of 4K60 capture (!) but does not have an onboard compression engine. So the capture or streaming application must cope with uncompressed video. That also means that when connected to an older host via USB 2.0 it’s only capable of 720p30.

If the host computer is resource constrained (no USB 3) the ability to deliver compressed video over the USB link can be a very real benefit. Similarly, an onboard scaler allows a capture dongle to accept 1080p60, while delivering 720p to the client application. There are times when this is also valuable. Typically, when you must use a client application that insists upon a particular video format, but the source delivers something else entirely.

El Gato Cam Link

These various considerations are why El Gato’s USB 3.0 connected Cam Link (reviewed previously) can be so cheap. It does essentially no onboard video processing.

That’s great if it does what you need. I used one at ClueCon 2018 to capture the 1080p60 stream from a BlackMagic ATEM switcher into my vMix host.

My i7-powered Airtop-PC is quite powerful and vMix is massively flexible, so the limitation of the Cam Link were not a factor. However, Cam Link not especially flexible. The older, USB 2.0 connected HD60 is actually more useful.

Update: A couple of people have refuted my claim that there can be an advantage to USB 2 capture devices over USB 3. I accept that the headline is a little click-baity. My intention was to highlight the fact that the new generation of USB 3 capture device did not do something that their older, USB 2 predecessors made commonplace. As a result, if you have an older, slower and/or I/O constrained host you might find that the new and supposedly better capture devices put you at a disadvantage.





Obvious Answer: vMix




Less Obvious Answer: VLC & NDI Tools


VLS viewing RTSP stream


Continue reading “How-To: Using an RTSP Stream as a Source for a WebRTC application”

Pixel Receives Pie

Android Pie

Today my Pixel phone received an update that was reported to be Android Pie. This was the general rollout of Pie, which is Android 9.x. Since I participate in the beta program I’ve actually been running an earlier version of Pie for a couple of months.

USB Headsets

One of the new things in Pie is the ability to access the USB port for general purpose functions. Specifically, it now supports both generic UVC and UAC devices.

USB Audio support has been around for quite some time. Given a suitable USB-on-the-Go adapter I have connected a USB headset and it just worked. I’ve done this in the past, using a USB call center headset with my Nexus 5 and Pixel.

I’ve also used a miniDSP UMIK-1 calibrated microphone to make sound measurements using AudioTool. This combination worked especially well connected to the now discontinued nVidia Shield K1 tablet.

USB Cameras

Similarly, you can connect a USB webcam and it will be available to apps on the phone. Most apps will not have access to the USB camera. They simply aren’t aware that it’s possible to have such a device.

I’ve used USB Camera along with a common Logitech webcam. The USB-Type-C-to-A adapter that comes with the phone makes the physical connection possible. Once the app is running it can record and stream the camera output.


It can be added in vMix as a stream source using a simple URL as shown below.


With a little experimentation I suspect that this could be used to record or stream the output of a UVC compliant video capture dongle. That would make the phone effectively an RTMP encoder for live streaming.

USB Ethernet

While at Cluecon last month I had occasion to connect my Pixel to Ethernet. The main stage at Clueon was in the Lucerne Room at the Swissotel, which is in the basement. There’s no T-Mobile coverage down there so I had the Pixel connected to the Cluecon Wi-Fi.

The Wi-Fi for Cluecon attendees was sensibly configured with client isolation. No-one connected to the Wi-Fi could see anyone else also connected. As it should be.

That also meant that my desktop, connected via ethernet, could not see a live stream from the Pixel while on Cluecon Wi-Fi. This got in the way when I wanted to use RTSP Camera Server to turn the Pixel into a roaming wireless camera.

As a quick experiment, I connected a USB-Ethernet adapter to the Pixel. I’ve carried one of these ever since buying the Lenovo X1 Carbon, which lacks on-board ethernet.

Putting the Pixel into airplane mode it was thus on the same wired network as the desktop. So arranged, the desktop could “see” the RTSP stream from the app.

I later discovered that the Cluecon “Presenter” Wi-Fi, a separate network, had client isolation defeated, making it possible to roamed untethered with a phone acting as a wireless camera.

Greater USB device support in Android will doubtless be handy.

Logitech Rally: A New 4K PTZ Webcam



Logitech Rally Camera







Continue reading “Logitech Rally: A New 4K PTZ Webcam”