On: Google Meet premium video conferencing is now free...

[hadrien01]

Wait, they had something simple to understand (Duo for consumers, Meet for professionals), and now everyone has access to two different products doing about the same thing?!

Google and messaging products... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat

[lima → hadrien01]

Duo is for 1:1 video calls and has stickers and cute animations.

Meet is a video conferencing tool. What's the confusion?

[abraham → lima]

Duo now supports 12 people on one call.

[interestica → abraham]

Hm, duodecuple is the tuple for 12. Maybe this was their plan all along.

[thisoneworks → interestica]

That makes sense since we all have exactly 12 friends, that's the official friend cap for the year 2020.

[taborj → thisoneworks]

Anything more and it gets super tedious to maintain 6 feet of separation and still be able to hear each other.

[Mindwipe → abraham]

Not on the web.

[londons_explore → hadrien01]

Except they didn't interoperate, Duo didn't work on laptops, Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding...

[marticode → londons_explore]

Duo works on any browser at https://duo.google.com

[taborj → londons_explore]

I have a wife and a child who use Meet regularly, both via sub-$400 laptops. No issues that they've reported.

[microcolonel → londons_explore]

> Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding

How did video decoding in software affect sound quality? Is this just a typo/brainfart?

[londons_explore → microcolonel]

Having spent 5 mins debugging it... it looks like the audio and video buffers are occasionally not exactly the same lengths, and it causes a glitch in the audio whenever the audio buffer is slightly longer.

It doesn't seem to happen when not CPU capped though, which I haven't quite figured out...

[IanCal → microcolonel]

I don't know if it's what they mean but having your fans go absolutely nuts in every meeting can't be great for sound quality.

[cameron_b → microcolonel]

The video encoding/decoding could have leveraged hardware accelerated codecs and freed up resources for audio encoding/decoding

[microcolonel → cameron_b]

Audio encoding is not of particularly high complexity. Even the highest complexity modes of the best codec right now (Opus) are like 60-100x real time on commodity hardware, and not too far off on phones.

[officemonkey → londons_explore]

Duo works fine on my $200 Chromebook.

[ghaff → londons_explore]

>Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop

Certainly not my experience. I use a few different video platforms including Meet and have never noticed material differences in sound quality. I mostly use an iMac but it's about a 5 year old system so it's hardly high-end by today's standards.

[enitihas → hadrien01]

And that page still doesn't list GTalk, the precursor for hangouts.

[Zarel → enitihas]

It does, it's the second top-level bullet point:

> Google Talk, a defunct instant messaging service released by Google in 2005

The page was last edited over a week ago, so it's not like I'm seeing a newer version than what you're seeing, either.

Or did you think "GTalk" was an official brand? Google has never abbreviated it that way, only users.