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Every web-based video chat I’ve used (including Google Meet and Slack) makes the fans on my decently-specced 2018 MacBook Pro spin up like it’s about to take off. I’ve tried Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Zoom (via the native Mac app) doesn’t do this. Does anyone know why browser-based video is so resource intensive?

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Use Safari. Turn on the developer settings, and find the setting to disable VP9 in WebRTC. That will force Meet to stop using VP9 and switch to H264 for which MacBooks (and Intel CPUs in general) have a hardware accelerated decoder and encoder.

Note that H264 is not as efficient as VP9, so you may end up using more bandwidth or have lower quality because of this.

true but this is a favorable tradeoff.

i also recommend forcing mpv->ytdl to h264 for the same reason; fan keeps quiet while watching youtube.

Just tested a Google Meet meeting while on a native Zoom video call. Google Meet used 3x more GPU resources while having 1/5th the video participants.

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