I've tried Jitsi Meet and found it to be smooth. During a hangout call with a group of ~8 friends I introduced it as an alternative. User experience comparison:
Onboarding:
Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts.
Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Video Quality:
Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts.
Hangouts: Passable but grainy.
Video Layout:
Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens.
Hangouts: Same.
Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.
It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the same person for their email repeatedly.
I proposed Zoom vs Jitsi Meet the other day for a virtual hangout with a group of friends. They initially wanted to try Zoom... because of the virtual backgrounds. Yup, that is what they wanted.
It isn't just a gimmick, it is a legit feature when working from home and you don't want everyone to see your messy kitchen or bedroom. Sadly the chrome app version you have to use for ChromeOS doesn't support that feature anyway :(
Confirming that it isn’t a gimmick. I have been working on distributed WFH Teams for the past 5 years now (long before COVID19) and this has been a consistent point of embarrassment and/or trouble with video conferencing. I can’t begin to tell you how many times we have had people that need extra time to prepare for a meeting because of the background. As a manager, I have had lots of personal conversations with employees who legitimately stress out about getting the computer into a place with a good background.
Zoom and GoToMeeting offer the option for for these backgrounds without needing to do a green screen or anything. Yes, the backgrounds are insanely silly. Like a stock photo of a beach, outer space, a meadow, etc.. I don’t know why one of these companies isn’t smart enough to just put a picture of an empty room as one of the backgrounds. Yes you can tell that the user is using a background still, and it occasionally clips the background wrong for a few seconds, especially during sudden subject movement, but it does largely protect employee’s embarrassment which is a legitimate reason to offer it.
The absolute best implimentation of this background thing is Microsoft Teams’ video chat platform. It does a “blur” background that actually looks pretty good. It is an extreme blur that makes it almost impossible to tell what is in the background, but it looks sort of like a high end camera with low depth of field. Obviously it isn’t going to fool anyone into actually thinking it is real, but it is the least-distracting and most appealing option I have seen yet. Kudos to Microsoft for that one.
(I have no dog in this fight, just sharing experience. I don’t work for Microsoft. Use whatever you guys want. I am just offering my 5 years of experience fighting with employees about video conferencing. I have heard all the problems with it, but the embarrassment of their background is always the biggest and most common one. Other common ones include wardrobe malfunctions (from employees getting dressed really quickly before a meeting), Significant others saying or doing embarrassing things on camera unknowingly, employees saying embarrassing things while thinking they are on mute, and so on. But the most common complaint is the stupid backgrounds.
Zoom refuses to allow virtual backgrounds without green screens, on non-Intel CPUs. I have a laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 3700U CPU supporting AVX2 I think, but Zoom won't allow me to turn that feature on. I mentioned this in a chat room and people speculated Zoom was paid off by Intel.
That blur looks great. Too bad I have literally never been able to successfully join a Teams call. Every single time we have to fall back to telephone.
That is odd. A large school I work with in the UK rolled out Teams as an emery year measure yesterday. Everyone was happily doing group video chats, no problem.
I think it works fine for people who have accounts set up. But if you get invited to a Teams (or Skype for Business) meeting, you are often required to log in with an account. This is very different from Zoom, which you can participate in without an account.
I have also been sent in infinite loops of download installer, install, now go download installer again.
>cheesy virtual backgrounds or blur real background
Seems like a stock slightly blurred image of a wall or bookshelf would be best option
The problem I have with the stock backgrounds is they impart a non-professional feel to the meeting....do i really want to show I’m mentally ‘sitting on the beach’ or ‘out in space’ while talking about who gets downsized?
I don’t really like Zoom, but I was on a call the other day with 3 other people calling from phones and iPads, all using virtual backgrounds. You don’t need beefy specs to use the feature.
Probably the other poster meant it requires a lot of CPU for you to have a virtual background, not for other people.
It wouldn't make sense for other people using the feature to take any more processing power--I assume the video is encoded and processed the same either way.
I think the OP meant that people using iPad and iPhone to call in also had virtual backgrounds, so concluded that it might not need as much CPU as the GP surmised.
Another poster mentioned though that Zoom required green screens for this feature on non-intel CPU machines.
I used this the other day in the free version. The text over the screen was annoying, and the background effect was rather glitchy, but it was effective at hiding the mess I was too lazy to clean up.
However, as we were using it for work conference, I felt like I was adding some goofiness to the call and didn't like that. I ended up moving the camera to show less mess, and then eventually actually cleaned up my mess.
I use it for a bunch of goofy stuff in meetings to lighten the mood. When I want to be serious, I change the background image to a photo of our office. If you combine it with OBS studio, you can overlay yourself on presentations or videos, which is also very useful.
I'd be far more willing to turn the video on in my calls of people weren't going to see the messy room in the background, and the calls I'm in have an awful lot of blank screens that would be better if people turned on there video for some face-to-face communication. I think it's less non-essential than you might imagine, this is a really well thought-out feature, and probably pretty technically challenging to implement too.
I just looked up virtual background and that is insanely cool and I totally get where your friends are coming from. I've got to give that a shot sometime - the kinds of features people can build are just so cool
> Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Hangouts (now Meet) is better geared towards GSuite orgs where you're already logged into Google since you have to be to access almost all of your other internal company/school resources, including gmail. It also solves the contacts problem since everyone will be in the company directory.
Ah-ha! Google Hangouts Meet is indeed the GSuite video conferencing solution, complemented by Google Hangouts Chat, the GSuite Slack competitor. Google Hangouts is "deprecated" but still alive, and with a plain-old gmail account I don't see an option to use Hangouts Chat nor Hangouts Meet, only Hangouts. As a user in a GSuite org, Chat and Meet exist, and plain-old Hangouts text messages are mirrored in Chat, but the video conferencing is still weirdly separate from Meet.
It's weirdly hidden but if you go to meet.google.com and make a meeting, others just need the url to join, no faffing about with connecting to other users in gmail. It needs a corporate gmail account to use though.
I'm not sure is deprecated.
If you're free (paid by your own data), Hangout is the 'consumer' version.
Meet is the paid platform, with more business oriented features.
Meet has a setting that lets you choose how to see people. By default, it shows up to 4 people in equal tiles. After that, it puts the talker large and a few people in small tiles to the side.
But there's a layout option in the vertical dots menu that will let you force it back to 4 large tiles. You cannot specify how many tiles, though, it's always 4.
IIRC classic Hangouts doesn't have the option to tile.
Meet (assuming you're on the current UI, which I would presume has been rolled out to everyone by now) can tile, but only up to four videos (excluding yourself, so five participants). Once you go above that, in automatic mode, it'll drop back to the view with a single large video of a person currently speaking, and smaller videos of everyone else on the side, and, if you force it into the grid view, only four are displayed at a time.
That's the disheartening part. Most hadn't used Hangouts before, one person suggested it due to social distancing, ~1hr into Hangouts call as we're struggling to add another member I introduce Jitsi and paste a link into the group chat. Used for ~15 minutes, then dropped and the manual invite process for hangouts began again - organizer couldn't find the option to generate a sharable link to a Hangouts call (it does exist).
Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile. If free software, vendor lock in, excluding those without Apple products, etc. etc. aren't sticking points for you, Facetime is awesome for a family/group of friends with iDevices.
Depends on how you are defining "worth" here. They are the only devices "worth" their price as evidenced by how well they hold their value and how much consumers are willing to pay for them. They are not "worth" the high price if you are valuing the internals (what GPU, processor, memory, HD you get).
I've ended up with multiple iPads over the years despite my best efforts. They definitely do stop working after a while. I've also noticed MacBooks get burning hot doing a video conference for more than 15 minutes. And I'm not a hardcore gamer, but my kids play Minecraft and it's fine by glitchy.
Compared to the Acer I bough for $700 with a basic Nvidia card and upgradeable memory that can handle everything I throw at it. My last Acer ran fine for almost 6 years but I dropped it one too many times.
Now do me this favor: take your experience and opinion, and compare it to others. How many people share this with you? If the Acer was just that substantially better in terms of value and build quality, why isn't Acer the #1 laptop in the US? Why do so many companies, organizations, and developers not share this take with you? What may you be missing?
Hackintosh are hard to build, by any reasonable definition, even for an average HN users. It's possible some people find that easy, but surely it is much harder than following an even medium difficulty tutorial.
Have you tried building one before? I built mine for the first time in February with 0 prior experience with such things and followed this guide: https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-...
If you're doing a config with a motherboard that's well used you can generally find the right configs to use. If you're using something not often used, you'll have trouble with the initial setup but once you get over that initial setup trouble in my experience everything will work and stay fine.
There are also lots of helpful people in the /r/hackintosh subreddit and discord if you run into troubles.
I was debating between building a hackintosh and buying the new MacBook pro and I can say 100% it was worth it.
I'm now first time using Mac due to my project. It works fine, but I do prefer Linux for development. Hackintosh probably makes sense if you're stuck on some Mac software though.
Ironically I'm using Mac over Linux because I want to use parallels to run a windows application that I must use. I tried using VMware for a while but it drove me insane that everytime I switched workspaces it would exit fullscreen.
> Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile.
Out of curiosity: can you compare it to Google Duo? Because it has the best quality and stability of any 1:1 product I've ever tried (never tried Facetime)
It's getting long in the tooth by Google standards I suppose. Who knows when they'll axe it.
I think it's strictly 1:1 (which, I gather, Facetime isn't?).
It has good video quality, but what I like most about it is that it's nicely resilient on dodgy connections.
I've often used it wandering around my garden, at the fringe of Wifi range, and it does the right thing: tries to stay on Wifi, but switches over to 4G if the connection becomes too dodgy, then back to Wifi once that's stable again.
All of that with pretty minimal artefacts.
FaceTime has the best UX of all the solutions I've seen so far.
Seamless integration in the OS as long as you're in the Apple ecosystem and lightweight native clients (it seems to use hardware encoding/decoding does not make my fans spin like Zoom or any browser-based solution). No accounts or meeting/room IDs to remember or join, it just works with Apple IDs (which you're already logged into) or phone numbers for iOS devices (which work even if you somehow don't use an Apple ID).
Right. But I don’t want to have to tell a client to download an app. I’d rather they just go to a url like they do on an iPad. Not sure what the difference in browsers is between them, but I can’t imagine it’s much.
Onboarding: Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts. Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Video Quality: Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts. Hangouts: Passable but grainy.
Video Layout: Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens. Hangouts: Same.
Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.
It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the same person for their email repeatedly.