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Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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