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Comment by vorticalbox | Hacker News Reader

It's most likely due to the fact they are all electron apps rather than they are doing "something".

Hardware decoding is also an issue.. as in, not being used. Old webcams used to do h.264 encoding in hardware. Encoding has since now moved to the CPU which may or may not be fine.. the next issue becomes the codec chosen.. most stuff all has h.264 decoding in hardware.. but it's not being used anymore.. instead they're trying to use vp09 or h.265 or av1 which in many cases requires CPU-based software encoding and decoding.. so the fans rev up like turbines.

I feel certain the reason this is happening is because some middle-manager terrorist in a boardroom said "use this codec it won't require as much network data usage! value for the shareholder!" without asking first whether hardware encoding is beneficial even if there's a bit more network traffic with the older codecs.

Really burns me up. I do not want to use software encoding/decoding if I have hardware support.

I think Google Meet uses VP9, which is really annoying.

Bandwidth is the limiting factor in a lot of circumstances, and networks are very challenging to manage. Especially with an increasing number of users on mobile connections, reducing network usage can be the right call.

But performance matters, too, of course. It's tricky to balance them.

> electron apps

Which only adds limited overhead to certain cases. Unless they are encoding/decoding video directly in JS...

Correct, teams doesn’t use videotoolbox so it’s software encoding. Probably not directly in javascript per se, it’s probably calling a native library, but it’s hot because teams doesn’t use hardware encoding.

Video encoding and decoding is expensive! Especially as cameras improve and users' expectations of quality increase.

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