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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Except they didn't interoperate, Duo didn't work on laptops, Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding...

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Duo works on any browser at https://duo.google.com

I have a wife and a child who use Meet regularly, both via sub-$400 laptops. No issues that they've reported.

> Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding

How did video decoding in software affect sound quality? Is this just a typo/brainfart?

Having spent 5 mins debugging it... it looks like the audio and video buffers are occasionally not exactly the same lengths, and it causes a glitch in the audio whenever the audio buffer is slightly longer.

It doesn't seem to happen when not CPU capped though, which I haven't quite figured out...

I don't know if it's what they mean but having your fans go absolutely nuts in every meeting can't be great for sound quality.

The video encoding/decoding could have leveraged hardware accelerated codecs and freed up resources for audio encoding/decoding

Audio encoding is not of particularly high complexity. Even the highest complexity modes of the best codec right now (Opus) are like 60-100x real time on commodity hardware, and not too far off on phones.

Duo works fine on my $200 Chromebook.

>Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop

Certainly not my experience. I use a few different video platforms including Meet and have never noticed material differences in sound quality. I mostly use an iMac but it's about a 5 year old system so it's hardly high-end by today's standards.

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