Hangouts is awful in general...it heats up even very powerful computers in the process of showing pixellated, glitchy video with distorted audio, even over a very low latency 200 megabit connection. We use it every day for work and its a source of constant frustration. Honestly I'd prefer a conference call on a landline, we have the video off most of the time anyway because it seems to cause more audio dropouts when it's on.
turn off HD quality and it stops using the VP8 codec (no hardware acceleration) and drops back to H264 which is hardware accelerated. My cpu usage goes from 80% to less than 20%.
I have this issue with linux and I was wondering if it was hangouts (really, the old "GoogleTalkPlugin") on linux that was the issue. Is this on Windows you have these issues?
