21 ms·
Google Duo rolls out realtime AV1
- d1egoaz 7y agoI thought this was product was dead.
- andymoe 7y agoSame. I could have swore they canceled this. Maybe they had a chance of hear or I’m confusing it..
- xiphias2 7y agoMaybe it was, but right now it has gotten repriotized because of the coronavirus and Zoom valuation. Anyways I welcome the competition.
- mikelward 7y agoWhy would you think that? Were you thinking of Allo?
- jvolkman 7y agoMaybe you're thinking of Allo which was released at the same time. Pretty sure Duo is fairly widely used.
- Roritharr 7y agoIs it? I can reach more non-technical people on Signal than on Duo.
- recursive 7y agoReverse for me. Small sample size though.
- interestica 7y agoGoogle will kill the name and incorporate it into Meet once they add multiuser support....
- recursive 7y agoThey've been in the process of shutting down Hangouts for about half a decade now. I'll keep using it until it doesn't work.
- snazz 7y agoDuo already has multiuser (8 or 12 max) support. It's intended to be a competitor to FaceTime. Meet is intended to be a competitor to Zoom. They're not getting combined anytime soon, even if Hangouts is going to die.
- paxys 7y agoI know zero non-technical people who even know what Signal is. Duo is on a big chunk of Android phones out there by default.
- topkeks 7y ago> Le GoOgLe KiLl PrOdUcT Am I rIgHt PlEbBiT?
- nikanj 7y agoGive it 6 months. This is Google we're talking about, they'll kill it soon enough.
- ilikehurdles 7y agoNah, it's not popular. They'll wait until someone is actually using Duo before announcing its sudden demise. They'll probably open up an API first to make it all the more painful.
- xiphias2 7y agoThe blog writes that ,,Duo already uses AI to reduce audio interruptions'', but WavenetEQ was a Pixel 4 only feature as far as I know. Is it rolled out to everybody as well?
- ProZsolt 7y agohttps://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in... "WaveNetEQ is already available in all Duo calls on Pixel 4 phones and is now being rolled out to additional models."
- jupp0r 7y agoI wonder if what the hardware limitations are. Given the current state of AV1 encoders, I imagine there has to be hardware encoding to make this feasible.
- dstaley 7y agoIf I had to guess, the AV1 encoding is being done server-side. AFAIK no phone has a hardware AV1 encoder (or decoder for that matter). The bitrate is low enough that a software decoder is likely fast enough.
- topkeks 7y agoIt's not done server-side. The calls are end to end encrypted.
- ajconway 7y agoThey specifically state that Duo is end-to-end encrypted.
- battery_cowboy 7y agoDuo claims to be e2e encrypted, so they can't do that, theoretically.
- devonkim 7y agoThere's certainly some trade-offs that could be possible by limiting the flags and quality ranges for the output similar to what we already for h.264 and h.265 hardware encoding. Another rando possibility is FPGA cores or someone figured out how to do the calculations with GPU or TPU acceleration.
- ipython 7y agoI'm confused- as far as I'm aware, there are three different video calling products at Google - Hangouts, Meet, and now Duo? What are the similarities/differences between them?
- dstaley 7y agoHangouts doesn't exist anymore. There's just Google Meet (business-focused video conferencing) and Duo (consumer-focused video calling).
- flattone 7y ago>hangouts doesn't exist anymore This is very worrying because hangouts is the only thing I use. All of my contacts use hangouts except for a few SMS, and I heard about Slack. And this is a mostly current or ex Google crew...
- ravenstine 7y agoNot sure why people keep saying this. Right at this moment, you can go to hangouts.google.com, start a call, and everything still works. That's not to say that it's going to be around much longer, but it still exists.
- beowulfey 7y agoGoogle originally said consumer hangouts was being phased out back in Jan 2019. Since then they’ve appeared to walk that back and are only phasing it out for GSuite users. I’m definitely not holding my breath though.
- Mindwipe 7y agoAnd it's still better than the current product suite even with half of it killed.
- BenjiWiebe 7y agoHangouts definitely still exists. I use it regularly. Hangouts.google.com and the Hangouts app. Maybe it will be axed soon, I don't know. But it does exist at this point.
- skunkworker 7y agoAFAIK there aren't any current mobile devices that have native AV1 playback so this is all in-software for now? Though if the goal is to allow for extremely low bitrate use it might not chew up too much of the processor and battery.
- skavi 7y agoI think MediaTek has put an encoder into their newer chips. Qualcomm still hasn’t though.
- salimmadjd 7y agoThis might be a great product, but I'm so burnt by various Google's connectivity and social media products that I won't invest 1 minute of my time on it. Because I know it'll be matter of days before google cancels it
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ip26 7y agoI spent one minute getting my grandparents to install it. One more minute getting my parents to install it. Now we video call. The end. Unlike chat apps, there's not that many people I want to video call.
- hrktb 7y agoI already spent 5 minutes explaining my wife how it's neither Hangouts nor Meet, even if it uses the same Google login. At some point clear marketing becomes a user facing feature.
- 1024core 7y ago> I already spent 5 minutes explaining my wife how it's neither Hangouts nor Meet, even if it uses the same Google login. Why would she care? It's a separate app. Just fire it up and start a videocall with someone. With Duo I can call friends on Apple devices, and the quality of the call is excellent. I use it to call my mom (in another city) any time I want to talk to her. She's a technophobe, but even she can answer the call and start chatting with me.
- hrktb 7y agoYou case seem to be straightforward because your mom only uses one service. It’s a mess that you need to care about when you use four or five calling services. There’s frustration on a lot of aspects, one of them for instance being that both Hangouts and Meets are integrated to Google Calendar, so if you use both a private and corporate gmail, you’ll get a link to one or the other depending on your meetings. Sometimes from the same calendar screen. Some people won’t care, but there’s enough cases where it will be a PITA to remember which one you’re using or will be using, just to get back to the right window for instance. But really the main frustration is you can’t give someone a Duo address. Or a Google Meet address. You have to give them your email, and then negociate what service they can/are comfortable using. And ghey have to remember what was negociated.
- dcdevito 7y agoAndroid needs a video calling app built into the OS. I’m tired of calling family and friends on Zoom.
- tinyhouse 7y agoDuo is not built in. However, I installed it and last week I discovered that it automatically integrated with my phone calling app. Now that I call people I can choose video call and it uses Duo for that. (But only if the other person has Duo too)
- Godel_unicode 7y agoIf they built it in, it wouldn't update as fast. They can't mandate it because of the EU antitrust ruling.
- danielscrubs 7y agoMicrosoft got around that by asking European consumers which browsers they wanted: https://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/01/europe.microsoft.web.browser/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/01/europe.microsoft.web...
- tricot 7y ago>If they built it in, it wouldn't update as fast. Even system apps can be updated through the Playstore though.
- izacus 7y agoThis is literally what Duo is. It's preloaded.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Adrakhones 7y agoAnd group calling is still only available for iOS and Android, not through the web app. Odd choice.
- wffurr 7y agoLet me know when I can start video calls from the browser. Until then I am sticking with hangouts.
- tracker1 7y agoYeah... I use hangouts/google-voice mainly because I don't want my messaging tethered to my phone number.
- petters 7y agoDuo also works with your Google account.
- tracker1 7y agoIt had me add my phone number to it.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoLast I checked, you cant get a google account without a phone number
- advisedwang 7y agoNow: https://duo.google.com/ https://duo.google.com/
- awill 7y agoexcept web only supports two callers. Not group chat
- giarc 7y ago>Duo makes it easy to send personalized video and voice messages when you can’t call. I've never understood why Facetime doesn't allow this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gevz 7y agoI think you can send voice messages and/or make a video straight from FaceTime UI and send it immediatelly.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kick 7y agoThey really should have had the Duo logo on the left side of the side-by-side comparison gif; it gives off a really poor first impression on the right.
- adrianmonk 7y agoYeah, that seems like an unfortunate oversight. Since they are both Duo, it shouldn't say Duo on only one side.
- bane 7y agoBeing stuck at home and working 100% through Teams, I have to say, if Google wants to have a long-term strategy here, being more like teams and less like Apple or Facebook would be better. Chat + Forums + Fileshare + Video chat + Voice chat + OneDrive integration + Sharepoint integration + Kanban + goodness knows what else Before the lock-down we all turned our nose up at it as "yet another lame chat app", now it's dominating everything, and it works on MacOS, Windows, iPhone, and Android -- so there's no excuse for anybody to not have it on their phone as well. There's nothing else that's even close for us and just on my team we have about 60 people on it, and across the company over a thousand. It's almost 100% replaced all the other things that do the things in the list above with the exception of Jira and a few holdouts still using Webex (so there's a dial-in for people outside our org who don't have teams, but we've even been using for meetings across different organizations that have teams and it works perfectly fine). Duo, Meet, Hangouts all seem really spare and kind of old fashioned now.
- pwarner 7y agoI am not sure Teams does anything well, but it does many things! Actually, I take it back, it is the best interface into SharePoint!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- p1necone 7y agoI was surprised after hearing all the negativity about it on here and other places that I actually like it. I don't see any major flaws - what problems do you have with it? We used slack before and teams definitely feels like a step up.
- curiousgal 7y agoPersonally I have issues with the Android app. For instance I sometimes can't join a meeting from my phone (I can see that the meeting started but there is no way to join in). The only solution is to join in from my laptop, only then does the Join button magically appear in the app.
- mtgx 7y agoI don't know what they were doing before but I remember Hangouts video chat taking 10 MB/s, while WhatsApp just 3MB/s.
- mgamache 7y agoI bet that it's only for very low bandwidth usage. In that case it would probably only have to encode a 640x360 frame (or even lower) at 15fps. It could also take shortcuts to reduce the encoding complexity (like block size and motion estimation). Still an important step forward.
- kreetx 7y agoIs this in any way related to WebRTC, or just Duo-specific?
- thomasahle 7y agoAV1 and the whole open media format alliance is pretty great. It's hard to fathom that it's only been a couple of years since all the good codecs were locked down and patented.
- ubercow13 7y agoAV1 is patented heavily too, it's just that a group of companies that believe they own all the relevant patents offer a royalty-free patent license for the codec
- kibwen 7y agoWhich (AFAIK) is still a huge blessing for OSS users; IANAL but its patent situation seems to as benign as that of the (extremely popular) Apache License.
- acdha 7y agoAlso, don't forget what happened with H.265 where things were pretty far along with the MPEG LA patent pool and then the second HEVC Advance pool materialized demanding additional payments. Given how cut-throat the space is I am still afraid of that happening once it'd be hard to back away from AV1 — there's at least one company trying that now: https://www.cnet.com/news/patent-group-wants-a-new-toll-on-the-streaming-video-road/ https://www.cnet.com/news/patent-group-wants-a-new-toll-on-t...
- hvis 7y agoThere's not much we can do, collectively, except to use the best available probably-unencumbered option, and then wait for the courts to throw the patents away. Google starting to use AV1 in their products in earnest should either trigger the patent suits from the aforementioned "at least one company", or serve as an additional argument in favor of any company that starts using it now.
- aantix 7y agoAre good video codecs that hard to create that a competing open source offering couldn’t be created?
- Noxmiles 7y agoSo, this is probably a sign that the new Pixel Smartphone will have an AV1 hardware de/encoder. In Software, with 720p video (or more), the battery of the phone would be empty in no time.
- grishka 7y agoI'm not even sure it's at all possible to encode AV1 in realtime without hardware acceleration. Decoding, on the other hand, isn't all that computationally intensive.
- throwaway9d0291 7y agoDon't think of a codec as just a magic black box that takes in frames and spits out compressed frames. A codec is more like a toolbox or instruction set. It gives you a bunch of options you can use in order to compress a frame. Unless AV1 removed some of the tools from the earlier codecs it drew from (e.g. VP9), it's entirely possible to write an encoder with similar performance characteristics as the earlier codecs. What I'm getting at here is that AV1 isn't inherently computationally complex. Its reputation for being computationally complex comes from people looking at the reference encoder early on during development and treating that as the final product. The reality is that it shouldn't be too far from HEVC in terms of computational complexity.
- microcolonel 7y ago> I'm not even sure it's at all possible to encode AV1 in realtime without hardware acceleration On large PCs it's been possible for a while, through SVT-AV1. On phones I think less so right now, if you're talking about using AV1 to get noticeably better rates than VP9. That said, it's possible that they have a reduced set of tools/passess that can run in realtime on a phone, and it looks like the rate is extremely low, which also improves encoding complexity. Even software VP9 encoding has been rare on phones though up to this point, so I'm not sure exactly what is meant by this change.
- jupp0r 7y ago
- tibyat 7y agoWhy do we allow this spam free advertising space on HN?
- _6fmb 7y agoJust buy Zoom dude.
- nichos 7y agoThe only company worse on privacy than Google.
- bassman9000 7y agoIf it's E2E encrypted, what's the business model? Is it the call metadata (who/where/when) that valuable? Or is it just at loss to prevent future competition?
- mav3rick 7y agoPlatform lock in.
- jpeg_hero 7y agoIt’s hilarious watching Google trying to be a consumer-focus company. What features do they lead with: 1) end to end encrypted, and 2) we’re constantly making optimizations 3) uses AI to reduce audio interruptions, 4) and Excitingly! Coming Soon! we’re rolling out a new video codec 5) that works with very low bandwidth connections I dunno I use FaceTime, it “just works”
- ajconway 7y agoFaceTime is a great product, one of the best in terms of audio/video quality, but it does not work on the majority of devices.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoAm I the only one who has latency issues with Facetime? It makes conversations flow less naturally. Google's latency isn't stellar either, mind you. For all their issues, I think the best mainstream solution for latency right now is Zoom...
- mav3rick 7y agoNot everyone has an iPhone. Shocker.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoAnd in most of the world, the majority do not.
- graton 7y ago> I dunno I use FaceTime, it “just works” <sarcasm> I just tried to make a FaceTime call from my Google Pixel phone and it didn't work :( </sarcasm>
- what_ever 7y agoI haven't used Facetime so I can't compare but Duo just works as well? Have you tried using it? Also, have you tried video calling someone using Android phone using Facetime? And what's wrong if you tell features that make your app stand out against the competition or should they really say on their probably 50th update that it's easy to install? Disc: Googler.
- DethNinja 7y agoDoes anyone really buy that E2E encrypted stuff coming from big software companies? I don’t see any reason why someone would believe that without seeing the source-code and letting people host their own servers.
- mav3rick 7y agoAll our friends and parents should now run their own servers.
- poisonborz 7y agoYes, why not? It could be as simple as plugging a box to a wall and having a quick setup, like a router.
- mav3rick 7y agoLet's continue to engage because I want to screenshot this for posterity - So if you want to video chat with your parents, you will buy them a server and a phone ? Then when the server will fail, you will go to their house to fix it ? (Remember you can't video chat now)
- smabie 7y agoThere's no reason you couldn't do p2p video chat. Now you just need the phone (which you already need the way things work now).
- notatoad 7y agohave you ever tried to walk a non-technical friend or relative through setting up a router? "as simple as setting up a router" means it's too complicated for ~90% of people.
- poisonborz 7y agoHave you tried modern consumer routers recently? It's far simpler and faster than eg. a start-up setup wizard of a smartphone.
- daniel_iversen 7y agoHow does the Duo call quality (image quality, reliability, lag etc) compare to Zoom? (I know they aim at personal vs business respectively but for a small team I’ll choose the tool with best quality).
- ProZsolt 7y agoI think they are on pair, both are excellent. But Duo for more than 2 people is currently Phone only. Also, you can't schedule a call, which could be annoying for meetings. For personal calls I prefer Duo.
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoEveryone is commenting on the product but what I want to know is how on earth they are able to encode AV1 in real time. I tried AV1 encoding a few months ago and was getting about 0.3fps encoding 1080p video on an i7 4770k. I'm guessing the default settings on the av1 encoder are more focused on size over speed but still, how could they be getting 30fps video encoded in real time on a phone..
- kabes 7y agoCodecs usually have different modes. Typically a realtime mode trades quality for speed, e.g it will be just 1 pass with a lot of optimizations disabled.
- plorkyeran 7y agoI'm going to boldly guess that you were encoding at a significantly higher bitrate than the 30kbps they mention on the page. The lossless bitstream compression part of video encoding can be a very significant portion of the encoding time on faster speed settings, so lower bitrate means faster encodes. It also probably isn't 30 fps.
- emilfihlman 7y agoIt's probably variable framerate and localised frame updates.
- Klinky 7y agoThat demo looks too good for 30kbps for any codec, especially single pass real time. I am skeptical. Also find it funny they use a 2.5MB GIF to show a demo for ultra video compression. https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/original_images/Duo_540X540_TransparentBG_3s_splitscreen_05.gif https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...
- tambourine_man 7y agoWe are discussing state of the art video codecs on a page that's serving 26MB GIFs.
- paxys 7y agoIt's crazy to me that the largest players in tech (Google, Apple, Facebook etc) are all struggling to support more than 8-12 people in a group call while Zoom can do 1000+ without breaking a sweat (100 just on the free plan).
- aneutron 7y agoI would be very interested in seeing if they do in fact have some dedicated hardware for this. As far as I can tell, Google for example tries to keep its custom hardware (as in custom relative to the rest of the infrastructure) very minimal. But if Zoom or any other actor can for example implement some scalable ASIC or other dedicated form of hardware to transcode and do networking (perhaps even some encryption primitives), I could see how that would be easily done. Then again, I'd say Google and company have enough resources to do so, just not the incentive. I don't know the details about the finances at Zoom, but I'm pretty sure it costs A LOT to handle thousands of 1000 people conferences. If they're getting paid, and they're just getting started, maybe it's worth the cost. At Google et. al., perhaps is just a matter of cost vs. revenue. But they do have MORE than enough of brains, software and hardware to do so.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoGoogle Meet supports 250.
- dirtyid 7y agoWhat does a 1000 zoom conference even look like?
- therealmarv 7y agoTried all. Only Meet and Duo are really good and even with video when you connect to somebody in a jungle, 50% around the globe far, on a 3G and 100kbps max and super flacky internet connection. All other failed under this circumstances (the predecessor hangouts is also okayish). Don't know what Google does differently but boy this thing still works with really shitty slow internet. Glad to see AV1 usage here now. HD video chat with an analogue modem connection ;)
- arsenalist 7y agoI have been using Duo almost everyday for the past 2 years, the video/audio quality of the call has always been incredible given me and my partner's lacklustre internet connections and it does seem like Google is actively developing it. Having used alternatives like Hangout and WhatsApp, they really don't come close so I am surprised with the low adoption rate, at least within my circle of friends and family. I don't think Google will kill it given how actively they are working on it but I wouldn't be surprised too if they do, I'll probably have a hard time finding a replacement as good.
- cco 7y agoSeems neat, would love to try it out but unfortunately I can't think of any friend that uses Duo. Maybe if Duo had a web interface it would be useful? My friends and I have tried Jitsi over the past few weeks but it has been buggy as hell and we gave up. Zoom seems scummy, so we're back on Google Hangouts for awhile but that is not great for other reasons.
- decko 7y agoGoogle Duo does have a web interface
- antoinealb 7y agoduo.google.com :)
- cco 7y agoOh my...when did this happen? I had no idea!
- qkhhly 7y agoTwo years from now: Google is shutting down Duo...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bingobob 7y agocan they fix it so kids Family link account work without a dam phone number ffs Google Family link is a joke sometimes
- BooneJS 7y agoWe use Duo to let our kids talk to my father, who is out in the woods with an iPhone but no broadband. It works pretty well compared to FaceTime. One day the kids may get to visit him again!
- Pxtl 7y agoSolving the wrong problems. Duo's problems aren't encryption, they're poor ergonomics like bad Assistant support, bad support for people without phone numbers, and the fact that they lost all the headway they'd made with Hangouts by throwing out their userbase with a new product.
- jaimex2 7y agoAnyone use Duo? I don't have any contacts with it, I guess no one has faith it'll stick around like all other Google chat apps.
- Nightshaxx 7y agoI would love to use this....If I had any guarantee Google is going to support this in the long run.... Google doesn't seem to realize it's not easy getting your friends who aren't techheads to move from one platform to another, so in order to switch I have to know this isn't going to die soon. Untill then I'll stick with hangouts/skype. Why couldn't they just keep the hangouts branding? I have no idea, its kind stupid. (Also yes, I know hangouts is going to die. But it hasn't yet and that's what all my friends already know about.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cs02rm0 7y agoWould Meet get this rolled out next? I've noticed video quality on it seems to be really poor recently and even just freezes for people who aren't the current speaker. I don't have the same issue with Slack, Teams isn't great but isn't as bad as Meet.
- ksec 7y agoDang, any reason why this title is allowed when the post's title is different and its content barely mentions anything about AV1. Edit: I think it is a perfectly valid Question. I dont see why the Downvote. Not to mention it is against the guidelines.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoGoogle seems to be still flogging the dead as a doornail horse that is Duo. I don't see this going anywhere. Basically compared to Skype, Facetime, Whatsapp, Facebook, Signal, Telegram, etc. Duo is an also-ran that most users of the before mentioned competitors have probably never even heard off. I understand they managed to get some traction in some secondary markets that are mostly not the EU or North America. I actually have conversations with people on all of these, except Duo. I've never had a single person reach out to me with the request to do anything whatsoever on Duo. Not a thing. I've never seen it in the wild. I don't know a single person using it. I just came out of a meets/hangouts meeting. I'm sure the rebranding is very significant to Google internally while they deal with Conway's law and internal teams continuing to try to "own" this space. But from the outside it looks like more of the confused strategy around Google Voice/Hangouts/Docs/Buzz/Wave/etc. where there's always an orphaned thingy that is actually useful that vaguely enables people to actually talk and chat to each other. Meanwhile, between Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google seems to be lacking a good strategy for competing effectively with those. I find it very telling that startups that are Google customers still opt to use things like Slack and Zoom. There's something missing there; a vacuum that Google has been dancing around for years without actually managing to compete. Literally every team I've been on in the last five years had Google docs + gmail as well as Slack.
- zmk_ 7y agoIn my experience Duo has better voice and video quality than the rest.
- koheripbal 7y agoI agree, but I also think we demand conflicting things from Google. On one hand, we expect them to innovate and disrupt with new experimental products - then we get annoyed when they discontinue the ones that don't take off. ...and now we are criticizing them for not consolidating overlapping apps. Do we ask startups not to launch products they think will compete with existing messaging apps? In reality Google operates (somewhat) like a collection of startups. It's a messy marketplace for apps. Is it really sooo bad that giant Google has a couple different apps for messaging? We should also acknowledge that they are consolidating them (at least Hangouts and Meet). Maybe they could do a better job, but our negative reactions to them are out-sized.
- Jaruzel 7y agoMost of the comments are focusing on Duo, but the real takeaway for me is that the demo claims to achieve the better image with AV1 in only 30Kbps ! That's less bandwidth than the final dial up modems had.
- ChrisArchitect 7y agogreat to see the technology updates, and in this new world of way more video calls definitely more ppl will be using it just as an option on their phone (don't need to get into the marketing problems) -- what holds me back from using it is the requirement to use my phone number as the login. To me the phone number has hardly anything to do with the device and I'd rather just keep using my google account like all other apps.....