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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but modern Google Meet is significantly more useful to my day-to-day remote conferencing needs than Zoom. Modern Google Meet's advantages:

* It's nearly instantaneous to use. You can just bookmark any prior meeting ID you created and reuse it indefinitely. You just click the meeting on your bookmark toolbar and join the meeting. Creating a new meeting is also nearly effortless.

* Works right in your web browser. It doesn't default to pushing you to use a native executable.

* IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom.

Google Meet or Hangouts from years ago was quite bad, but it has improved nicely.

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Also the transcription. Fastest, most accurate transcription I've ever seen.

Yes - having it completely integrated into your Calendar (if you use Google Calendar) is the right way round, if I have a stack of remote meetings I should just need to know the when and the who - the how should take care of itself, as it does with Meet.

And multiple people can share their screen at the same time. And nothing is interfering with note taking by making the window full screen whenever a presentation starts.

I am using zoom rarely and every time I am baffled by it's horrible UX. Why do people use it?

> IMO, the video and audio both are slightly better than Zoom.

Firm disagree.

Three days ago, I presented a video in a google meet stream for 50+ people. For three minutes the stream dropped frames , displayed visual artifacts and lagged behind my narration.

I was on gigabit internet and so were my colleagues.

I never had this problem with zoom, and I would never use google meets for a streaming setup again.

Did you use the newish "Present a Chrome tab" feature to do this?

https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2020/04/high-quality-vi...

Normal Google Meet Present is optimized for slides/docs which is a very different problem than streaming video.

Well, it’s still a joke that Google Meet will stream desktop / windows at 4 FPS. I would be curious to know whether they really think the feature is good enough.

This is mostly a limitation of Chrome and other web browsers.

When streaming the desktop, the browser doesn't get notified when some region on the screen changes. That means it has to retrieve a bitmap of the screen and 'diff' it with every frame, which is computationally heavy.

FWIW, AirPlay can send a H264 video of my desktop at 60FPS with ~0% CPU impact (hardware accelerated), good enough to play many games on TV.

I believe Airplay has special OS integration - a third party app wouldn't have access to the screen buffer with zero-copy.. A third party app would at a minimum have to copy the data to system memory and back to the GPU, using a lot of CPU time for that alone, before any encoding.

Can it blur/cover backgrounds?

Yes it now has a built in blur background feature. (Pretty aggressive level of blurring in my experience.)

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