Comment by miki123211

6 months ago

> I think the explanation is quite mundane

> There’ll be plots of various stats, including CPU utilization. I think meet will also helpfully suggest closing tabs if your machine is overloaded

This is not mundane at all, it's a perfect example of giving your product an unfair competitive advantage.

If Meet users are told why their meeting isn't working correctly but Zoom, Teams and Slack, Meet users are going to have a better experience that Zoom, Teams or Slack has no way of replicating.

No wonder every other meeting provider pushes you aggressively into using their desktop app, Google Meet's desktop app is just Chrome!

12 comments

miki123211

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hot_gril  6 months ago

At least other video conferencing tools don't lag like Meet, so users don't need to debug ;) I think this has to do with all of them using H.264 while Meet uses VP8/9.

  • amluto  6 months ago

    Having had the dubious pleasure of trying to use Meet from various Apple devices, Meet didn’t lag because Meet couldn’t produce video at all. Maybe I only operate at the wrong edge of the Meet ecosystem, but it did not compare well to anything else out there.

    (I’ve tried Safari, I’ve tried the native app, and I’ve even tried the phone bridge (!).)

  • fayalalebrun  6 months ago

    As a result of a flaw in the protocol itself or in its implementation?

    • hot_gril  6 months ago

      The implementation is what I was thinking of. I've also heard claims that VP9 is inherently slower to encode than H.264, but no idea if that's accurate. AVC/H.264 has very broad hardware support. For example, the 2019 MBP I'm using right now can't do hardware-accelerated VP9 encoding, but even 2011-ish MBPs can do H.264 acceleration in both directions. Intel's support matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

      For PCs with dedicated GPUs, Nvidia's matrix doesn't even mention VP8/9 encoding, and for decode there are a lot of VP8/9 "no"s for GPUs that have "yes" for H.264: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-sup...

      AV1 looks like it's getting broader support, but it's still new. Zoom's release notes mention they'll use AV1 if the participants support it, and I don't see a similar note about VP8/9.

      2 replies →

trealira  6 months ago

> If Meet users are told why their meeting isn't working correctly but Zoom, Teams and Slack, Meet users are going to have a better experience that Zoom, Teams or Slack has no way of replicating.

I had to re-read this a few times; did you accidentally omit a word?

> If Meet users are told why their meeting isn't working correctly but Zoom, Teams and Slack aren't, Meet users are going to have a better experience that Zoom, Teams or Slack has no way of replicating.

I fully agree with you, though; it's anticompetitive for them to use Chrome to give their other products an advantage.