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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

You're right in that 99% of them are complete garbage. However I was pleasantly surprised when my company switched to Zoom[1]. A company I had never heard of before. In terms of call quality I've never experienced anything better. Beyond that their mobile experience is almost better in terms of raw features than their desktop app (which is still very good in its own right).

1.) https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoom-video-communica...

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Zoom is consistently garbage for us. The latency is high, the audio quality is low, and the apps have a really terrible user experience.

I wonder where the closest Zoom PoP is to you? I've had the opposite experience, Zoom worked on connections where Hangouts was terrible.

If two participants are in EU, the latency is awful. I don't get the impression they have multiple POPs.

I'm based in the EU (until Brexit anyway) and often do calls with mainland Europe. Never had that problem. Seen a high CPU warning a couple of times but it goes away. Overall I'm a fan. I have friends who use it for virtual conferences even.

Do you have people using the POTS gateways?

I use the free version out of the box to onboard new people (mostly independent coaches/consultants from around the world) as partners - see https://www.agendashift.com/partners to get a feel of geographic coverage

We use uberconference (nothing to do with Uber!) in North America and Europe (multiple countries) and it works like a charm.

I guess like every option mentioned here they all suck for someone. We have used Uberconference and the audio quality is terrible. And it's not uniformly terrible either which is even more frustrating. Some of the attendees won't be able to understand some people and other attendees everything sounds fine (although it always sounds like a poor quality cellphone conversation).

With Google Hangouts we have poor quality audio as well and at least once per day we have someone that their audio won't come thorough unless they restart their Mac.

I'm secretary for an org. We're trying to use uberconference for our executive board meetings. I like that remotes can call into conference bridge via phone.

I bought a SABRA bluetooth thingie for the room. Seems to work well.

Our results are mixed. We test out the conf room before the meeting starts. Good to go. Then weird stuff happens. People being muted. Their icon shows them talking, but no sound. People being dropped.

I don't mind the unreliability so much. 7 laws of networking and so forth.

I frikkin hate that I don't know what's broken, so can't hope to fix it. Especially DURING the frikkin meeting.

I've used Uberconference (pro) over fiber for a couple of years, and it's been rock solid. In cases where one caller is bad, the web interface will show you who is killing the call quality and lets you mute them.

Except in rare cases, I find the problems you're describing are usually a problem with the end-user, their equipment, or their network. Cheap phones, bad cell connection, bad voip, etc. An unmuted speakerphone with a noisy background can bring most calls to their knees.

We too have used Uberconference, I forget why we ditched that as well, might have been down to the cost of the thing. I actually quite liked it, the web application was solid and it encourages ad-hoc meetings.

We (2300 employees or so) use a mix of

- Zoom (larger meetings where we need it to be rock solid),

- Hangouts (for smaller / quick meetings since we are in Gsuite), and

- WebEx (for external tech support / keyboard sharing)

- Slack / Screenhero (internal chat and keyboard sharing)

Zoom has been a revelation especially with large videoconferences. Rock solid global performance.

When is Slack going to release Screenhero as part of their standard product? They swallowed the latter well over a year ago, and nothing's come of it.

The answer I received when I asked about linux support for SH may be helpful here: Instead of porting screen hero, they are (were? 6 mos ago) working on integrating the features into Slack.

I refuse to use anything that requires proprietary plugin/app. AFAIK so far the only thing that works natively in the broswer is Hangouts.

The power drain from Hangouts/Chrome is astounding. I admit it's convienent but native does have its benefits it you need a lot of video conferencing (like all day pairing)

Adobe connect allows participants on desktop to enter in the browser without software downloads aswell (http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect/meetings.html).It's expensive though. Anyone know any more inexpensive options that work natively in the browser? Would be nice to get a little list going.

Hangouts requires a proprietary plugin in Firefox on Linux. I'll use it for work, on my work computer, but I'll never use it on my personal computers for that reason.

appear.in

appear.in requires a plugin for screen sharing but otherwise, I do like it.

The plugin is dummy, required by chrome and just gives permission to share screen. Appear.in has been whitelisted on firefox and requires no plugins there.

Saw your comment too late and already made my own (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13641706).

I'm wondering what your CPU usage looks like in Zoom sessions when just participating vs. when you're sharing your screen.

Sharing screen with Zoom takes a decent amount of CPU, compared to just talking, which eats only about 5-10% from my experience.

Is this for audio only?

Which platform and hardware are you on?

Depends on what programs I have open. The ultimate combo to make my Macbook cry is running a Zoom meeting with video enabled and asana.com open.

+1 to this.

We're across 24 hours of time zones and conduct a majority of internal and external meetings over video conference. We've pretty much tried them all and Zoom has been the best.

That said, there are still things to improve, so will be interesting to compare.

We've recently switched to Zoom too, and had pretty good experiences with it.

I'll also +1 - Zoom has consistently excellent video and audio, and is a breeze to use.

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