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..

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.