The expected delay when viewing footage should be ~2 seconds whether viewing in SQ or HQ. If you are seeing a delay greater than ~2 seconds review this article to make sure your network has the minimum bandwidth for our cameras to live stream.
Background
When you are looking at footage on your device, your browser needs to download the video files from the cloud. You can see these files being downloaded on the Network tab in your browser's developer's tools when you filter for ".m4s":
Live View
Historical Footage
For a smooth stream, each video file needs to be downloaded in less than a second. Any longer will cause the video to not stream smoothly.
Causes of Buffering
There are two causes that result in camera streams buffering. Insufficient upload speed on the camera's network and insufficient download speed on the viewer's network. This causes the video files to downloaded slower.
Notice that it took the browser longer than a second to download these files.
Identifying where the problem is
In order to figure out where the problem is, you will need to conduct a speed test on the camera's LAN and the affected device's LAN. You can do that by connecting a computer to the same LAN as the camera or the affected device and running a speed test on your preferred internet speed test website.
Fortunately, Google has a built-in speed test through their search engine:
Need more help? Contact Verkada Support.