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I haven't used Zoom, but I have attempted to use Google Meet for video chat and it was an abysmal tire fire. My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easte
by war1025 6y ago
I haven't used Zoom, but I have attempted to use Google Meet for video chat and it was an abysmal tire fire.
My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easter and I thought, "Hey, we use Google Meet at work. I bet it will be great for this." It was a completely unusable experience of frozen videos and dropped audio. I was ready to just completely throw in the towel on the entire idea.
My mom said, "Well, me and my sisters have been using Skype for years and it works just fine." So I begrudgingly downloaded Skype and created an account. It just works. It's amazing.
We've been doing video chats every Sunday evening with my mom and my brother's family for a couple months now. I thought I hated video chat. It turned out I just hated Google's idea of video chat.
My wife uses Facebook video chat with her mom and it works pretty acceptably too. I think Skype is still better, but Google Meet is absolute bottom of the barrel in video chat technology. Which is a shame because Google Meet works great for audio with screen sharing.
Maybe Zoom works comparably well to Skype. I hope so.
- KMnO4 6y agoI’m my experience, Google Meet has very steep minimum bandwidth requirements by default. You can (and probably should) set the send/receive quality to 360p video, but it’s miles behind the adaptive bandwidth scaling that Zoom and Skype use. If you force your network adapter to be 1 Mbps mid-call, Zoom will quickly butcher the quality to keep up. Google will drop out.
- eitally 6y agoDuo is a much better choice for family video chat than Meet/Hangouts
- war1025 6y agoI've never heard of it before you mentioning it. That does look to be more in line with what I'd want. A bit confused why they wouldn't leverage the same technology in Meet since that seems to be the product that gets more press.