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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

Hangout's encoding also it's a real performance hog because most devices don't support H.264 in hardware. Every time I'm in a hangout the fans come on and the battery rapidly drops towards zero.

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Most devices DO support H.264 encoding. Hangouts however uses VP9 in Chrome and that's not HW accelerated. If you use Safari on Mac it'll switch to H264 and that will stress CPU less.

It has exactly the same problem in Safari on mac in my experience. Battery is dead in about 10 minutes.

Yes, you are of course right. Confused the two.

I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.

I've tried to run 4K60 VP9 (and h.265 for that matter) video from youtube on the latest top spec MacBook Pro and it's completely impossible to watch. Transcoded to h.264 and computer barely gets warm.

Maybe you could rephrase that. How many years of human progress and CO2 emissions have been caused by the uncooperative licensing situation caused by these software patent owners?

Well by that logic we can ask anyone for free stuff and point at CO2. Google is not giving away their data for free, the lend it to you.

> I'd love to see someone do the math how much CO2 is Google unnecessarily produce by enforcing VP9 because they are fussy about licensing fees.

It would definitely be an interesting way to look at how bad software patents are for our society. It's not Google's fault (though they do participate in this system) that good technology had been locked away only to be used by proprietary software.

Well Google want something for free, why can't I get stuff from Google for free? Like, not rent their data, but actually browse their index properly (remember, verbatim && date search has been removed and it's likely to get even worse).

Not sure what that has to do with a discussion about why Google uses a non-patented codec rather than a patented one. What access Google gives their users is not a factor, and is a non-sequitur.

But also I think you're missing the point of free software if you want to limit usage of free software based on your personal value judgement of a company. That's antithetical to free software.

Hangouts Meet fixes this. I believe they try to pick a codex per system that is supported in hardware (rather than using VP9 whenever it could).

(I work for G, opinions are my own)

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