6 ms·

I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD fe

I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.

nunb 12y ago
I believe you can opt out of it. I was annoyed for a while at having Hangouts foisted on me but now (in Gmail at least) I've gone back to the old interface which, while not jazzy, is perfectly functional.
- Encosia 12y ago
  Same here. I tried very hard to transition to Hangouts to get a jump on what will probably be unavoidable at some point anyway, but I had to revert back to the old interface after a few weeks because GV/VoIP is so unusable on Hangouts.
higherpurpose 12y ago
The Hangouts app must be built by Google's worst engineering team. It's terrible on mobile, too. The Play Store and maybe Youtube are probably slower than it, but at least those have an excuse: heavy content/graphics. What's Hangouts' excuse? A few lines of text on the screen and some tiny icons? It's a chat app...it's supposed to be fast, not super slow.
- jebblue 12y ago
  I've been using it for months, took some getting used to but it works great.
- tomgg 12y ago
  On mobile I dislike all of the kinematics. If you're composing a message and scroll up to quickly reread something, the keyboard will fly off the screen; getting it back requires tapping on a text box ...but now the keyboard is _covering_ part of the message you need to read; got to scroll back up---damn lost that keyboard again. There's also no way to 1) hide people's avatars: I really don't need 20 visual reminders (one for each message they've sent) of who I'm chatting to; I don't even need 1! 2) hide the emoticon selector: who uses this rubbish? 3) adjust the "people you hangout with": there are 6 tiles of faces (most of them rigmarole-distributing frequent emailers who suck) and the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with"---the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with". Google...
- TheCraiggers 12y ago
  If it's any consolation, the new version of it released yesterday seems to have been optimized a lot more than the previous versions. Despite the added functionality, it feels a lot snappier. This is on a Nexus 5, not sure about other/older hardware.
macNchz 12y ago
I don't understand why hangouts has to use so much CPU. I have a top of the line, brand new laptop, and using hangouts never fails to heat it up and get the fans going. In contrast, a multi-way video chat on http://appear.in http://appear.in has much more stable audio and video quality, somehow doesn't require half of my CPU, and doesn't even require a plugin. My team is distributed, and we use hangouts every day, so this has not been a one-time experience, and it has been like this for years at this point.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- dharma1 12y ago
  Perhaps this is why: http://www.androidcentral.com/google-moves-hangouts-vp8-offer-720p-hd-video http://www.androidcentral.com/google-moves-hangouts-vp8-offe... Instead of hardware accelerated h264 (almost all chipsets have hardware decoding/encoding of h264), they use their own VP8/9 - which is decoding/encoding on CPU Also the reason why Google Glass can't do Hangouts - not powerful enough for software encoding. They should just use h264.
  - cbr 12y ago
    patents
    - dharma1 12y ago
      is it that costly really? rest of the world is using h264 pretty much everywhere
vidarh 12y ago
Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his grandmother in Norway. So I tried Google Hangouts. It's marginally better. But it's still awful, and odds are about 50% that one or the other end of just fails to work (suddenly wants to reinstall the plugin, or just plain refuses to recognize the camera). It's just incredible to me that a decade after I had reliable, working video chat, things appears to have gotten steadily worse, not better... I have 10 times the bandwidth - or more -, for example, both up and down.
- koyote 12y ago
  Might also be ISPs introducing traffic management and whatnot.
  - davidw 12y ago
    It should be possible to test and analyze this.
    - kleim 12y ago
      Give a try to Netalyzer: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/ http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/ Here is an report sample: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=example-session http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=example-session
- DAddYE 12y ago
  I'll be down-voted, although I solved the problem with: .. FaceTime. If you don't have a mac you can get a ipod touch. That's what I use to talk with my family USA->Italy. Is the only thing I found that is reliable and has a quite good quality.
  - 12y ago

nunb 12y ago

I believe you can opt out of it. I was annoyed for a while at having Hangouts foisted on me but now (in Gmail at least) I've gone back to the old interface which, while not jazzy, is perfectly functional.

Encosia 12y ago
Same here. I tried very hard to transition to Hangouts to get a jump on what will probably be unavoidable at some point anyway, but I had to revert back to the old interface after a few weeks because GV/VoIP is so unusable on Hangouts.

higherpurpose 12y ago

The Hangouts app must be built by Google's worst engineering team. It's terrible on mobile, too. The Play Store and maybe Youtube are probably slower than it, but at least those have an excuse: heavy content/graphics. What's Hangouts' excuse? A few lines of text on the screen and some tiny icons? It's a chat app...it's supposed to be fast, not super slow.

jebblue 12y ago
I've been using it for months, took some getting used to but it works great.
tomgg 12y ago
On mobile I dislike all of the kinematics. If you're composing a message and scroll up to quickly reread something, the keyboard will fly off the screen; getting it back requires tapping on a text box ...but now the keyboard is _covering_ part of the message you need to read; got to scroll back up---damn lost that keyboard again. There's also no way to 1) hide people's avatars: I really don't need 20 visual reminders (one for each message they've sent) of who I'm chatting to; I don't even need 1! 2) hide the emoticon selector: who uses this rubbish? 3) adjust the "people you hangout with": there are 6 tiles of faces (most of them rigmarole-distributing frequent emailers who suck) and the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with"---the 6 same people are repeated in a list of 10 "people you hangout with". Google...
TheCraiggers 12y ago
If it's any consolation, the new version of it released yesterday seems to have been optimized a lot more than the previous versions. Despite the added functionality, it feels a lot snappier. This is on a Nexus 5, not sure about other/older hardware.

macNchz 12y ago

I don't understand why hangouts has to use so much CPU. I have a top of the line, brand new laptop, and using hangouts never fails to heat it up and get the fans going. In contrast, a multi-way video chat on http://appear.in http://appear.in has much more stable audio and video quality, somehow doesn't require half of my CPU, and doesn't even require a plugin. My team is distributed, and we use hangouts every day, so this has not been a one-time experience, and it has been like this for years at this point.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dharma1 12y ago
Perhaps this is why: http://www.androidcentral.com/google-moves-hangouts-vp8-offer-720p-hd-video http://www.androidcentral.com/google-moves-hangouts-vp8-offe... Instead of hardware accelerated h264 (almost all chipsets have hardware decoding/encoding of h264), they use their own VP8/9 - which is decoding/encoding on CPU Also the reason why Google Glass can't do Hangouts - not powerful enough for software encoding. They should just use h264.
- cbr 12y ago
  patents
  - dharma1 12y ago
    is it that costly really? rest of the world is using h264 pretty much everywhere

vidarh 12y ago

Video chat options in general frustrate me to no end. Skype - at least on Linux - have steadily dropped in quality over the last few years (the old cynic in me wants to blame MS for no particular reason). Back in 2006-2007 I used Skype video chats daily with few issues between the UK and California. These days I have problems getting it to work reliably within London, and have given up on it to let my son talk to his grandmother in Norway. So I tried Google Hangouts. It's marginally better. But it's still awful, and odds are about 50% that one or the other end of just fails to work (suddenly wants to reinstall the plugin, or just plain refuses to recognize the camera). It's just incredible to me that a decade after I had reliable, working video chat, things appears to have gotten steadily worse, not better... I have 10 times the bandwidth - or more -, for example, both up and down.

koyote 12y ago
Might also be ISPs introducing traffic management and whatnot.
- davidw 12y ago
  It should be possible to test and analyze this.
  - kleim 12y ago
    Give a try to Netalyzer: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/ http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/ Here is an report sample: http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=example-session http://netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/restore/id=example-session
DAddYE 12y ago
I'll be down-voted, although I solved the problem with: .. FaceTime. If you don't have a mac you can get a ipod touch. That's what I use to talk with my family USA->Italy. Is the only thing I found that is reliable and has a quite good quality.
- 12y ago