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Comment by cantbecool | Hacker News Reader

I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.

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Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his grandmother in Norway.

So I tried Google Hangouts. It's marginally better. But it's still awful, and odds are about 50% that one or the other end of just fails to work (suddenly wants to reinstall the plugin, or just plain refuses to recognize the camera).

It's just incredible to me that a decade after I had reliable, working video chat, things appears to have gotten steadily worse, not better... I have 10 times the bandwidth - or more -, for example, both up and down.

Might also be ISPs introducing traffic management and whatnot.

It should be possible to test and analyze this.

Give a try to Netalyzer: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/

Here is an report sample: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=example-session

I'll be down-voted, although I solved the problem with: .. FaceTime. If you don't have a mac you can get a ipod touch. That's what I use to talk with my family USA->Italy. Is the only thing I found that is reliable and has a quite good quality.

In the end, FaceTime is only adequate software. There isn't anything particularly annoying about it, and it does what the average user expects.

What makes FaceTime incredible is that no one else on the planet can make anything even close to adequate in that space.

It can be mind boggling to cycle through Skype, Lync, Google Hangouts, and every other piece of chat software on your computer, all failing in bizarre ways, only to think, "Oh yeah. Let's try FaceTime" and have it work.

If I ever move overseas again, I will be purchasing an iPod Touch for each and every older family member before departing. FaceTime works remarkably well.

I'll leave aside the meta commentary on your (unneccessary) downvote comment.

Facetime is what makes it possible for me to stay in touch with my family on the other side of the planet, and that's even if I'm sitting out in a park far from Wifi. It just works, and even if it hiccups once in a while, the reliability is high enough that you just shrug it off with the confidence that it will recover. This is on LTE with good reception.

On a recent trip to the US from the UK my wife and I each used a BlackBerry Playbook with the built-in video chat. It was perfect -- no discernible lag and I was able to talk with the kids with great video and sound quality.

So, perhaps Skype and GV are suffering from over-extended networks? It must be hard to justify investing in better network infrastructure for a free product (or when your revenues are minimal). On that note, I don't get the impression that BlackBerry's network has much of a problem with network load these days...

This is what's so annoying about Apple: why no Android client? How can you hope to have a communications platform that is so severely constrained? That's why so few here barely even know about Facetime. You can't invest in it because it's so limited.

'hope to'? They don't hope to, it exists. 15-20 million FaceTime calls every day: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/28/apple-40-billion-imessag...

So 8% of users try it once per day? I'm wondering how that compares to phone, messages, email, whatsapp, Skype, etc? Very poorly, I'd say.

Try appear.in or one of the many other webrtc providers.

skype on android is really, really bad. it doesn't even bother to tell you if your wifi is turned off. it'll just "ring ring ring ring" then show a message that the person wasn't available.

I use their subscriptions plan to call home from my Nexus 4. Most of the time skype on android shows offline users as online. Sometimes it shows me that I am signed in and online, but nobody could see me till I try to signout and signin multiple times. The worst problem is it reboots the phone frequently whenever i do video calls. Gets updates often, but they never fixed any of these problems.

Worse than that; I've found Skype on Android will actually kill the wifi connection. It's awful.

I work for a startup in the commercial video space, and one of the reasons we can compete against such giants is that their software really doesn't work that well... even for people who've paid shedloads for Lync.

I also work in the commercial telecommuting space. Its easy to compete there, because existing solutions are so crusty its laughable. All the voice apps revolve around phone calls and conference calls, things rooted in 1800's ideas about communications.

I don't understand why hangouts has to use so much CPU. I have a top of the line, brand new laptop, and using hangouts never fails to heat it up and get the fans going.

In contrast, a multi-way video chat on http://appear.in has much more stable audio and video quality, somehow doesn't require half of my CPU, and doesn't even require a plugin.

My team is distributed, and we use hangouts every day, so this has not been a one-time experience, and it has been like this for years at this point.

Perhaps this is why:

http://www.androidcentral.com/google-moves-hangouts-vp8-offe...

Instead of hardware accelerated h264 (almost all chipsets have hardware decoding/encoding of h264), they use their own VP8/9 - which is decoding/encoding on CPU

Also the reason why Google Glass can't do Hangouts - not powerful enough for software encoding.

They should just use h264.

patents

is it that costly really? rest of the world is using h264 pretty much everywhere

I believe you can opt out of it. I was annoyed for a while at having Hangouts foisted on me but now (in Gmail at least) I've gone back to the old interface which, while not jazzy, is perfectly functional.

Same here. I tried very hard to transition to Hangouts to get a jump on what will probably be unavoidable at some point anyway, but I had to revert back to the old interface after a few weeks because GV/VoIP is so unusable on Hangouts.

The Hangouts app must be built by Google's worst engineering team. It's terrible on mobile, too. The Play Store and maybe Youtube are probably slower than it, but at least those have an excuse: heavy content/graphics. What's Hangouts' excuse? A few lines of text on the screen and some tiny icons? It's a chat app...it's supposed to be fast, not super slow.

I've been using it for months, took some getting used to but it works great.

On mobile I dislike all of the kinematics. If you're composing a message and scroll up to quickly reread something, the keyboard will fly off the screen; getting it back requires tapping on a text box ...but now the keyboard is _covering_ part of the message you need to read; got to scroll back up---damn lost that keyboard again.

There's also no way to 1) hide people's avatars: I really don't need 20 visual reminders (one for each message they've sent) of who I'm chatting to; I don't even need 1! 2) hide the emoticon selector: who uses this rubbish? 3) adjust the "people you hangout with": there are 6 tiles of faces (most of them rigmarole-distributing frequent emailers who suck) and the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with"---the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with".

Google...

If it's any consolation, the new version of it released yesterday seems to have been optimized a lot more than the previous versions. Despite the added functionality, it feels a lot snappier. This is on a Nexus 5, not sure about other/older hardware.

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