The restraining criteria to video quality for me was the hardware capabilities of the laptop which I used. This is how to determine the maximum resolution of video encoding your hardware is capable of:
The following answer is mostly based on this much longer blog post: http://blog.schertz.name/2013/05/hd-video-lync-2013/
Check whether the graphics chip in use has hardware accelerated video encoding. For Intel chips, it must say something like "Quick Sync Video" on ark.intel.com. Also note the number of cores of your CPU. For AMD, check the source-link above.
Check, whether your hardware supports DXVA. For this, press Windows+R and enter
dxdiag
. Click "save all information..." to save everything to a file. Open the file and search forDXVA2_ModeH264_VLD_NoFGT
. If you find it, you have DXVA.Check your
VideoEncodeScore
. Search for this term in the file%Windir%\Performance\ WinSAT\DataStore\*Formal.Assesment*
(There can be a number of files like this in that folder, open the most recent.) The score is a decimal number. Search in the same file forGraphicsScore
. Also note this number.Now go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj688132.aspx and check which maximum video encoding resolution applies to your spec.
There is also the chance you have a camera that supports HD 1080p H.264/SVC UVC 1.5 encoding. Currently, it seems only this one does so: http://www.logitech.com/assets/47868/logitech-webcam-c930e-data-sheet.pdf