Everyone 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..
The speed of an encoder really comes down to how many optimizations it's searching through. The AV1 format allows a lot more options when encoding, so encoder writers kinda feel obligated to try a bunch of them out to see if they save bandwidth. But if instead a codec just picked a few optimizations and ignored the rest, it could be pretty fast. Maybe Google just found a set that worked well for an average video chat.
When streaming with x264 for example, most people usually use the "fastest" or "fast" preset, anything lower and you'll start dropping frames. Similarly I'm sure they can adjust levers to make av1 work in real time.
As someone who has been reading a lot of AV1 benchmarks over the last few months, it's also unclear to me how/why they're doing it. AV1 (and specifically google's libaom) is great, and for VOD-based content it is ready for primetime, but h264 is better for realtime streaming from just about every standpoint.
Though, AV1 is way, way better than h264 when bitrates are super low... I don't know. I wish I had more details about the implementation.
The best definition for "super low" that I can come up with is "bitrates at which x264-encoded content becomes hilariously unwatchable."
I will try to be more specific. Youtube uses x264 to encode videos at a certain bitrate. Were you to encode the same video with libaom (AV1) at the same bitrate, the quality difference would probably be noticeable to a casual viewer. If you were to cut the bitrate in half and run the same comparison, the quality difference would be extremely noticeable to a casual viewer.
The article has a gif showing this. The right side is hilariously blocky, while the left is decent. Visually, from experience, it looks like somewhere between 100 to 200 kbps.
EDIT: Err, I'm stupid it says 30kbps right there. Though that definitely looks closer to 100 to me (unless framerate is lower)
For chunked encoding and distribution on a massive scale (Netflix/Youtube), AV1 is the clear choice today.
For making encodes for personal use, HEVC/x265 is the clear choice today, and it probably will be for a long time.
If you want to use AV1/libaom and see significant efficiency gains over HEVC/x265, you will have to allocate a lot more encoding time. There's no way around that. You will also not be able to make use of multithreading to a significant degree, for libaom at least (I have not seriously tested other encoders). There are third-party programs in active development that perform chunked AV1 encoding for the purpose of utilizing all your cores.
aom --cpu-used=5 is currently strictly better than x265 --preset veryslow, putting aside the threading issue. Beats it in encoding time and efficiency. But it's an unfair comparison.
AV1 features better compression for the same image quality and a key selling point is that it's patent free. Facebook and YouTube are pushing for AV1 adoption as that's going to save them $$$ on bandwidth. We'll see.
I hope it's just not gonna be another VP9 where Google flips the switch to save some bucks on bandwidth but there not being any dedicated decode hardware in the wild yet, meaning everyone's battery gets nuked.
The problem is it has to be that way because nobody includes hardware decoders until major players are using the codec, so it's chicken and egg.
In theory the hardware vendors could notice that Google is developing a new codec which they could be reasonably expected to start using and then include hardware decoders in their devices before Google starts using it, but they don't really have the right incentives to do that. "Our device has a hardware decoder for a codec nobody is using" isn't really something customers buy phones based on. Meanwhile if the vendor doesn't put it in this year's model then they get to sell you a new phone with a hardware decoder next year after Google flips the switch and your battery life tanks until you buy the new phone.
I'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.
I watched my fair share of RealPlayer video at about that bitrate 25 years ago. I see absolutely no reason that a modern codec designed for low bitrates couldn’t look that good on a talking head. It’s not like they are pandering though. They released the software. There is no need to speculate.
GIF only allows 256 colors per frame, so not really lossless when it comes to photos/video that exceed that limit. I guess there are some hacks around this, but typically they're not used.
The hacks you allude to are based on the fact that GIF also allows you to use:
* Transparency in a frame, which will show the previous frame underneath
* A different color palette per frame
* An infinite frame rate (no delay between two frames), which is also configured per frame
These three points combined allow you to show any video in full 8-bit color via the GIF format.
Unfortunately there's a difference between what GIF allows and what popular browsers allow GIF to do. Specifically all browsers set a minimum frame delay to 10ms == 100fps. This got started in the 90s due to performance concerns in Internet Explorer. Then people kept setting frame delay to 0 in their GIFs but it looked still fine in Internet Explorer. This resulted in a lot of GIFs that would look broken when the browsers would follow the GIF spec. This desire to support broken GIF files is why even in 2020 browsers limit GIF frame delay to 10ms.
Even so, if you only need 25fps for your video, you can get 4*256=1024 colors. Again, these colors can be different from frame to frame.
It’s not lossless. It’s lossless after quantization of the color palette, and pretty much every encoder out there does a crap job of not losing too much perceptual or actual data in that step.
That was on laptop cpus though. Even if Google optimized the encoder to accomplish this on mobile processors, a fully utilized cpu would drain batteries so fast that the user experience would suffer.
Codecs 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.
I can't quite believe my own arithmetic but... that would mean the page is larger than 30 minutes of video streamed using the new codec. Can that possibly be correct?
Calculations here, someone please tell me I'm wrong:
The caption quotes "30kbps", but that has to be a typo - I think they mean 30KBps (240kbps).
I don't think the codec uses 30kbps by default, that specific example is showing what it would look like at 30kbps. Obviously if you have the speed for it, it'll probably raise the bitrate more. Duo is known for adaptively scaling up and down and smoothly switching between different network conditions.
There are four large .gif files. I believe the one you are referring to is 2.6 MB and named `Duo_540X540_TransparentBG_3s_splitscreen_05.gif`, with a split screen comparison of what it would look like at 30kbps. The overhead is the graphics of the "montage", I figure.
I find a better way of inducing horror when it comes to page sizes is referring to “multiples of Doom” rather than megabytes. The original Doom shareware release was two 1.44MB floppies, so this page is 20.4 Dooms big.
There are only two ways of realistically demonstrating encoding artifacts: decode the actual format client side or transmit a lossless encoding. GIF surely isn't lossless, but its losses are somewhat orthogonal to those of the encodings in question. Still, yet could have done with much less of the same.
I suspect that hardware encoding is involved. Maybe upcoming pixel phones will feature a previously unknown hardware encoder? It would make lots of sense, especially for storing videos made with the camera.
Being 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.
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.
As someone who does all his work through teams I must say it's only strong point is integration with OneDrive and sharepoint. Other than that the application is a nightmare. On Windows its the slowest thing I'm running at any point, I understand its an electron app but there are no excuses for its performance. On android it keeps missing notifications. After a while the concept of teams in teams is being overlooked in favor of less formal chats which yet don't have all the features of teams. Now teams have channels which make zero sense if everyone from the team can also see them and there is no way to fix that.
Sharing code requires 4 clicks and there is no keyboard equivalent way to get to it.
And the list goes on.
The sad truth is that if teams didn't come for free with office 365 it wouldn't be able to stand on its own.
> Now teams have channels which make zero sense if everyone from the team can also see them and there is no way to fix that.
You can create private channels within teams. When you go to "Add Channels", there's a Privacy option that's set to Standard by default, but you can toggle it to Private and invite only specific team members to join.
otherwise i kinda agree except it's years ahead of lync, so for microsoft shops it's still a net win. my personal pet peeve is lack of a global mute keyboard shortcut (win+f4 for lync).
I'm not sure how this relates to Teams whatsoever and why you're drawing the comparison. Teams is for organizations who have Office 365. Duo is person to person chat... think Apple Facetime.
It's funny, because a friend of mine wanted to video chat yesterday. I wanted to use Hangouts, but he doesn't have an Google account (he's a director of his own company so he lives and dies with the company email), in the end he said: - No problem we'll just use Teams. Not having to create an account was kind of mind-blowing for me (in the "where's is the business incentive in not taking my email, and spamming it?!" kind of way).
While I don't see too many people take advantage of it, you can make a Google account without an associated Gmail account. You just have to choose "Use my current email address instead" on the signup page[1].
https://www.skype.com/en/free-conference-call/ has had web video calling with no sign up for years now, although they were terrible at advertising it, because when they re-told everyone last week it was reported by almost every tech site as a new feature
Please read what I said again, I think google should move more towards an integrated application that has several different kinds of communication modes in it vs. half a dozen applications in various states of languishing, usability, and availability.
I mean, that's just G Suite -- Chat + Groups or Plus + Drive + Meet + Meet + Drive + Drive + goodness knows what else.
I've never used Teams, but it seems like an awful lot for one app to handle. But the Google way of splitting it up across the logical apps seems to work well, since everything's integrated anyways.
At the end of the day, does it really matter if you're using different icons in your home screen or different icons in a menu?
Aside from the single sign-on, I don't find the integration of Google products to be anywhere close to Microsoft's.
When Google releases a new product, it's like the almost expect you to use it in isolation, but with your same account. And they love releasing new products. Google Calendar, Tasks, Keep, etc.
Microsoft Teams brings together Office 365, Exchange, Share point, OneDrive, and then adds collab features on top for comms and organisation.
You get your full existing Outlook Calendar appearing in teams, you get all your Outlook contacts, you can link to any doc in your OneD, shared edit, you get group chats and channels, you can create "Teams" (where the name of the app comes from) made up of different people in your Exchange org.
For anybody using Microsoft AD/Exchange within their org, Teams is a natural choice. You don't need a new account, everybody else in the org is immediately searchable and contactable, there's no data import needed. It just works. And "it just works" has been the central driving feature of anything that has taken off during this lockdown.
I mean, if your org already uses Microsoft then of course it makes sense to use Teams.
But I guess I don't see how Google apps are "in isolation", it's the exact opposite. All my contacts appear in every app, whether Calendar or Meet or Docs. Links work everywhere. The Google concept of a team is basically that when you create a Group you can generally use it everywhere else (to share a doc, to create a calendar event, to add to a Team Drive, to start a chat, to notify of a comment, etc.).
And heck, the "side panel" functionality literally allows you to load Keep inside of Gmail, or Calendar inside of Docs, if you don't want to open a whole new tab. Clearly the opposite of isolation.
Maybe you've just never used Google apps this way, that you haven't seen their integration? I find it entirely natural to have a tab for Mail, Calendar, Keep, Tasks, and several Docs and Sheets in my browser. Perhaps for me, my tabbed browser window is the same as your Teams app?
In either case, it seems like the functionality and integration is largely identical. Again, it's just a matter of whether the icons are at the browser tab or home screen level, or whether they're inside of a single app. It seems to be a very minor distinction at the end of the day.
Theoretically I'd agree with you. And tbh that's how most of us saw teams before this situation. It looked like yet another over engineered enterprise "communications" tool that was bound to have a lot of half-assed hard corner cases -- so we just ignored it and hoped it would just go away.
Now that we've all been forced to use it and come to terms with it, the deep integration is extremely powerful. In fact the couple areas within it where the integration is still a little thin stand out because the workflows around those end up being a bit fussy.
It can be difficult to explain to somebody who doesn't use it, but it's not something Google has sorted out yet, not even close. It's like saying "I have all the ingredients for a cake in my pantry, so they're all together, it's basically the same as having them together in cake form."
Google has all the pieces to do something even better than this, but their corporate culture is like a hammer shattering all the pieces into different bits with only the most superficial connections between them. They may be allergic to even try given what happened with Wave, but even a half-decent copy using the building blocks they have would be pretty great.
The critical component, MS Teams, is missing in G Suite. Google Chat feels more like posting on an internal message board, since it centers around creating threads rather than actual chatrooms. I can see why companies using G Suite, including ours, prefer Slack's UX or MS Teams' central approach to collaborate in Office 365.
There are rooms on Google Chat. The threads are in each room.
What is missing is a way to sort through the threads (no title, no list of threads, no way to jump to the ones you have a notification for…). And probably a way to sort the rooms too; I'm part of 23 rooms and it's all over the place (and growing).
I 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.
As many good things as I say about it, there's still some rough edges.
- Starting a group telecon from a channel doesn't seem to exist. You have to start a chat with the same people and then you can start the meeting.
- The screensharing selection interface is kinda wonky and doesn't show certain applications, it consistently won't give me an option to show Excel, but every other thing I have open is visible (MacOS).
- It gets hung up sometimes if people paste lots of images into a long chat.
- It needs better management of old chats, channels and so on, for example there's certain old chats from last year when we were first testing it that I really don't need around anymore and I'd like to get rid of.
- The notification system is a bizarre mess, I can't quite seem to find the magic combination that turns off notification sounds, but plays a sound when somebody calls me for a voice or video chat.
Personally 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.
I haven't used it in a year so things might have changed, but it seemed to only have the last 20 or so messages with a person stored in memory and I'd have to wait for it to load if scrolling up to see more, and then only load them in batches of 20 or so at a time after that as well. It also didn't like me trying to paste screenshots directly in to it. instead I'd have to save them as a file and then upload that.
For my use case at the time, which was getting engineering support as a software salesperson in an organisation with poor documentation, that was a huge downgrade from slack. Those extra seconds waiting or it to load or messing around with image files hurt when you're on the phone with someone.
The channel or team messaging part is unusable. You can't leave channels, you can't ever get the right people in a team. Everyone just ends up using group chat, which is way more closed.
For channel messaging it does not compete with Slack.
> .. so there's no excuse for anybody to not have it on their phone as well.
Unless you are one of those people (like me) who don't want to put work related things on your phone. I like to have a separation between work and personal life. Thus why I don't put work email (or other things) on my phone.
That's totally fair. Lots of people I work with have a separate work phone. My point was, even without a dial-in number, the app works flawlessly on a phone.
Even my Linux loving, MS doubting self is mostly happy with teams. It's the only video chat I've found that properly handles multiple screens when sharing my screen from Linux. Most apps will only share the entire X "screen" which means it shares all 3 monitors as a single screen but teams allows me to select the actual monitor I want to share.
If they got rid of the excessive whitespace at each side of the chat and used libnotify like civilized folks I'd be super happy.
>If they got rid of the excessive whitespace at each side of the chat and used libnotify like civilized folks I'd be super happy.
I wouldn't hold my breath. They use the same custom notification on Mac os and even on Windows.
Oh, and on Linux, have you tried using it with a tiling wm ? The notification gets its own regular window. The first time it happened it was quite jarring to have it fill half my 32" monitor. Even since that happened, I've went back to using it through Firefox, which honors the system notification setup.
That's weird, since sharing each window or tab is standard in most browsers. It's just a 'navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia' call. So I would expect any webRTC solution to support it.
Even better yet, say I'm on my company's Teams instance. And I'm talking with a customer, who is on another Teams instance.
I can cross over to their full videoconference with an invite, share screens, put notes in chat, whole 9 yards. For a moment, The company is just a logical division of the whole Teams infrastructure.
For the last few weeks, I've been on a weekly 50 person conferences with people from 6 entirely different organizations/companies and it's been absolutely flawless. Presentations, slidesharing, filesharing, chat, driving somebody else's computer, the works.
I've never experienced anything quite like it even if on paper it sounds like half a dozen other conference systems. It blows anything else I've used out of the water.
If you're not into Microsoft ecosystem then you don't really need it.
In IT company where Mac and Linux dominates we are already accustomed to other software and don't see any benefit in changing everything to use One Drive.
You are conflating two very different business models. Google needs these products to generate ad revenue. They already have the GSuite stack that competes with Microsoft.
Teams has an option for PSTN conferencing so if that's the only reason holding on to WebEx, it might be cheaper to add the PSTN option to Teams and ditch WebEx.
That's a good point. I'm regularly going back and forth between Teams conferences and Webex conferences and the Teams ones seem to take a quarter of the time to get started compared to the webex ones (with all the "are you on mute?", "I can't hear you" nonsense) and the quality tends to be higher.
Teams does a lot of things but not a single one is done well. Even the text chat, which has been working well for decades, is horrendously broken. The video calling is worse than Skype used to be before MS ruined it. I could go on.
I'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?
I guess “meet” being separate makes sense but I have to say that in the Apple ecosystem “Duo” and “Hangouts” have their counterparts in the unified iMessage/FaceTime system.
You used to be able to IM, voice chat, video chat, group versions of the former set, Google voice call Google voice sms, do all of the prior transparently on all of your devices, local sms, and local call from Hangouts.
Then they decided that wasn't the way they wanted things and have been slowly killing it off for 5ish years now
> Classic Hangouts will be retired for all G Suite customers starting in October 2019
Chat within Gmail is still hangouts. Hangouts.google.com still works. Users still use the hangouts apps.
On the personal side, if you use Google Fi, SMS integration is still only available via Hangouts. This is a somewhat unique feature of Fi and Google Voice. You can send/receive SMS within Hangouts via browser or app all the same. It's not like the Messages app for web (which relies on your phone being online).
no, this hangouts is still that hangouts. the slack competitor is "hangouts chat", the regular old hangouts app from 5 years ago is still going strong and most likely what somebody is talking about when they talk about hangouts.
IIRC, hangouts chat is still only available to paid g-suite customers.
Hangouts isn't pushed, but it's a holdover until they finish the merge of duo/video chat into messages, and the GSuite consolidation of meet/chat. There's some cool things coming from google that should have been done earlier, but represents them finally bringing all the pieces together in meaningful manner.
But even that isn't the complete picture. It's shouldn't take a shaman, a scholar, and random internet strangers, to explain what the heck they're doing in the audio/video messaging domain.
My understanding is Google has said externally that they plan on killing the classic Hangouts product. So that means Google chat and Google Meet would be available in consumer space for people with @gmail.com addresses. but right now the focus of those two products is on gSuite.
I'd also definitely agree with what other people are saying, duo is the FaceTime competitor. It has direct integration into the Google dialer in the Google SMS app. It's also rather brain dead simple to use.
Apparently GChat was only a colloquial term for the product formerly known as Google Talk? I thought it was a separate thing from the Talk VoIP service.
Good to know I'm not going crazy. Maybe being gaslighted by wikipedia editors but that's not out of the ordinary. The Wikipedia entry for Google Talk[1], says:
> Google Talk, also known as Google Chat,[1] was an instant messaging service that provided both text and voice communication.[2] The instant messaging service was variously referred to colloquially as Gchat, Gtalk, or Gmessage among its users.[3]
I wish they would put a "Messaging Czar" in charge with completely authority, to fix that mess. They know their target is iMessage and WhatsApp, yet don't seem to coalesce around any product in particular.
Are they too scared of regulators to make an iMessage-like service in Android? RCS will barely nibble at the ground they need to cover in order to compete for real.
Classic Hangouts is/was a lot of things. Sadly it was too many things. The new Chat has very similar Gmail integration, so if they ever get it out to consumer, it hopefully won't be a big change for people.
Hangouts has come a long way... it started out as a 'drop-in group video' feature for Google+. The idea being you could "hangout" with your friends by just starting a room and then anyone who saw it could join you. Basically Houseparty.
Do you know if there's any kind of whitepaper describing Duo's security model? When I search for information I'm finding a lot of stuff about Cisco's Duo product, but not a lot about Google's.
I've been using chat and meet for a few months. Chat has seen no new features added in months, the UI is atrocious (switching from a dark terminal window to a Google chat tab will burn your retina), it offers no customization besides the colour of your emojis and even the official Google bots can't understand basic requests like "Schedule a meeting with everyone in this room". Slack is way way (way) ahead of it.
The integration with Meet consists of a single "invite to video call" button that creates a new video call and inserts the link into your message. There's no option to stop people from inviting you to new calls/set your Google chat status as busy when accepting a call.
Meet itself is also frustrating to use for anything more than a 2-3 person meeting; it doesn't display more than 4 video feeds at once on your screen. It's also unable to save settings between video calls (if you don't want to have incoming and outgoing 720p streams all the time you have to change the settings at the start of every call). Zoom and even Jitsi are both miles ahead of it.
There is no reason to use either product besides the fact that they come with enterprise Gmail accounts. They both still feel like prototypes or minimum viable products (especially Chat).
Always thought the name choice was a bit weird. With a name like Duo, are they forever restricted to two-party calls? (Ha) It seems like the other video chat services (eg WhatsApp, Instagram) are incorporating multi user support.
The "knock" feature is kinda novel and weird (in a good way). When you call someone, they can see your video feed before they answer the call.
I think, much like FaceTime, it's designed primarily (both UX and architecture) around the two-party call use case, but can support several more as needed (12 total for Duo, 32 for Facetime).
Whereas solutions like Meet and Zoom are designed primarily (both UX and architecture) around multi-party, supporting 100's (250 for Meet, 500 for Zoom).
Note that intuitively, it seems like Meet and Zoom have the better model - why limit the number of participants when you don't have to? And in fact a lot of consumers seem to feel this way about it; many people I know use Zoom for everything, from large meetings to chatting with a small number of family members or confidants.
But under the hood, limiting the number of users allows some important technical advantages. Duo claims (in its FAQ) to be end-to-end encrypted. I believe Whatapp claims the same. And it wouldn't surprise me, knowing Apple, if their video chats on Facetime did too. This is possible only with a reasonable limit on the number of participants because of the need to negotiate a bandwidth for each stream that works for all viewers, and each stream needs to be independent, not multiplexed into a single live view.
The proper use of large-scale meeting products is in corporate or paid environments where you have some kind of guarantee that your chats aren't being recorded or sold. (At least unless a three letter agency is involved.) Tools that guarantee end-to-end encryption should be used in small group chats.
Your point about UX is a strong one too. There are a affordances that work better for smaller chats, others for larger ones, and it's helpful to be able to specialize.
> The proper use of large-scale meeting products is in corporate or paid environments where you have some kind of guarantee that your chats aren't being recorded or sold.
In banking/financial services, we want guarantees that all chats are being recorded. In lots of other regulated and government fields too.
> why limit the number of participants when you don't have to
Because beyond UX, there are a ton of technical tradeoffs involved.
In a 2-person call you want to avoid a server if possible, because it adds latency -- so that's a good first reason. Zoom and Meet would never dream of not using a server.
The optimal architecture of a "small group call" is totally different from a "large group call".
Lol, "facefull of unsolicited genitals" is not a phrase I expected to read today.
I agree though, this feature seems like a solution in search of a problem. If I'm answering the call it seems more natural to activate both cameras at the same time, and for calls I'm not going to answer the video feed just seems unnecessarily distracting. I'm sure that I have never wished for a feature like this.
If you call me on a consumer service which explicitly delineates that behavior, why would it be unreasonable for me to see your video before I accept?
Presumably you would know who you're video calling anyhow prior to calling them, so there's not really a meaningful privacy violation...
The only case I can think of is you calling me to expose yourself or something - to that, I'd say that a privacy option where you can make it so you have to add someone before they can video call you would suffice.
If our threat model in 2020 treats "unsolicited dick pics" as rare, and concludes that an "opt-out" setting is acceptable, we clearly haven't listened to what women have been saying for over a decade.
One of the problems with an opt-out setting is that it can become a viable attack vector whenever the application settings reset: "OMG New phone for my 14th birthday" will look like an invitation to some segment of the population.
Yes, which is sufficient. You can call your contacts on skype and then just show them your dick after they pick up... This is neither a Duo problem nor a common complaint (except for in regards to ChatRoulette, where it's also the USP).
I don't see how; the person shown is the one who initiated the call. Unless you're suggesting a flasher or something, but that's no different than any other video chat, except without the victim's reaction being visible (so, still better, actually thinking about it).
I'd rather ignore a call by looking at my screen, seeing a name/number I don't recognize, and swiping it away. This sounds like I'd have to look at my screen and see something I potentially do NOT want to see before I can ignore or swipe away the call. No thanks.
You need to choose your contacts better if you are genuinely concerned by this. They can already call you (and then, presumably, you'll just pick up) and then show you their dick.
Forget seeing random nudity, I don't even want to see a video of my husband's or kids' face on my phone unexpectedly.
Why should my phone be displaying something chosen by someone else unless I explicitly opted to engage with them (in this case by answering a video call)?
Plus, even if I did have contacts with a dick pic sense of humor, I'd much rather see a dick from them after I opt in to the call (so that I make sure I'm in an appropriate setting). Getting one randomly is insane.
Imagine if your husband or wife called you for some phone sex (say you are on a long trip) but you happen to be in the elevator with strangers on the way to your room. Brrring! No thanks.
Not 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.
Google 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.
Hangouts 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.
Google 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.
I use Duo almost everyday (and so do my friends) and IMO it has the best audio/video quality overall, speciality on sketchy connections.
Glad to see they are still making improvements, but with Google you know that products are simply abandoned from time to time so can't get too attached to it really.
Duo seamlessly handles switching from Wifi to LTE when walking outside my house. Most other services drop the call. Not sure if it's the case anymore but Slack used to lock up completely.
Ditto. I had never heard of Duo until, after limitless frustration with flaky Slack calls (starting twice, not starting, phantom copy of myself in the room, phone keeps ringing after I've answered the call on desktop, etc), a friend suggested we try Duo instead.
I've been blown away. I've never given it access to my phonebook, so I just dial numbers by number, but the video quality is stunning. The latency is so low as to be almost jarring compared to other video services, and usage is simply effortless. Duo Just Works™. I haven't looked into how or why it's so good, but I'd love to learn more....
....and hopefully find an independent system that works the same way so I can keep using it when Google inevitably shitcans this a few months down the road.
> Duo seamlessly handles switching from Wifi to LTE
Maybe they can teach the Waze team to do this since they're both part of Google. Relevant because in my driveway my phone will still be on my wifi, and when I drive away, Waze becomes unusable for a few minutes.
I 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.
You'd think they'd force every android phone to have it, and then bake it into the dialer. It's doing the whatsapp thing of using your phone number as your account, because people realised most people can't sign into accounts to save their life.
Android dialer should have Start Voice Call, Start Video Call, and Start Group Call, where only the first one uses ye olde voice network
Pixel phones at least do have it. I use it sometimes with my girlfriend because the video quality is higher and because it runs on my laptop, so I can use a bigger screen when at home. But WhatsApp also offers video chat and she defaults to using that because our conversations (when apart) start with text chat, and WhatsApp works fine too.
Basically, Duo suffers from being only video chat. I don't know why Google can't make a WhatsApp competitor that's good. I think the problem is it's never had a CEO that really cared about this product category so it flails around, dominated by professional product managers who don't have any burning innovative idea (unlike when WhatsApp was new and the big idea was to use phone numbers instead of user names).
Current availability:
Chat features in your Messages app are available in France, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US, and across multiple operators globally. We are working on bringing chat features broadly to more regions, operators and other messaging apps (e.g. Samsung Messages).
Back when Duo launched, Google force-shipped it to my phone. I saw the notification, laughed out loud at the idea that I'd ever start using a new Google product, and never thought about it again.
I actually thought Duo was already officially dead. After some research, I think I was confusing it with "Allo", which I've never heard of outside of hearing that it is dying.
This 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
This is sadly very true. I remember watching Google I/O when Duo and Allo were launched. They seemed like a dead product on arrival - no difference whatsoever to existing offerings. Indeed, I remember how the product was discontinued in record time. If you had asked me, Google Duo was dead. Turns out - perplexingly - they only killed the chat app part (Allo) but the FaceTime part (Duo) still roams the Earth as some sort of an undead Google messaging product, probably awaiting its turn in the purgatory (occupied by G+ maybe).
Apart from GMail, the only Google communication app that actually made a difference and people liked was Hangouts. For unknown reason, Google would really love to kill it. It officially does not even exist anymore, but I and many others still use it daily.
Funny how when you have nearly infinite money you can do absolutely mad stuff and no one just cares.
Oh, people care. Google put a ton of money and effort into Stadia, but it flopped on launch and now seems quite dead. I'd put a good chunk of the blame for that on Google's reputation. Any online discussion or news article about Stadia mentioned Google's penchant for killing products. It's hurting them, but perhaps not enough to overcome their ad revenue, so there's not much motive to change.
> 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.
You 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.
It is going to get easier, atleast in one use case.
My understanding is you will be able to receive video calls inside android/messages even if duo is not installed, but initiate calls only if duo is installed.
what kind of time investment is it to use a video calling app that comes pre installed on many phones? I called my mom on it the other day but if Google cancels it tomorrow I'll just use something else next time
Tried 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 ;)
AV1 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.
Also, 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-t...
There'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.
AV1 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
Which (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.
Lots of good bits came from FOSS codecs but Daala and friends have never competed with the commercial stuff that have 100s of decades of paid engineering time in development.
Also it’s pretty impossible to do anything in the codec space without tripping over a patent.
That said the very best implementation of the patented and un-free H.264 codec was built as open source (x264) but you still technically need to license all the h.264 patents to use x264 legally in many scenarios or jurisdictions.
So to be more accurate the problem is not open source being unable to compete with commercial stuff on technical merits.
If you read some of Xiph's development blogs (with work on new audio or video coders such as aforementioned AV1), a lot of the process is carefully going around the "inventions" that the bug bucks have declared as their property at the patent office.
No, I mean zero of the pure-FOSS video codecs have ever been anywhere near stare-of-the-art in their time. So FOSS codecs have for three decades been unable to compete on technical merit.
Even the current state-of-the-art audio codec Opus gets a lot of its efficiency from proprietary algorithms from Skype that were Open-sourced and parents made royalty-free.
Video codecs are bleeding-edge comp-sci and expensive to develop (lots of highly paid engineers, test labs, and test subjects (people) required).
Well, I recall the previous "poster child" of FOSS codecs was Ogg Vorbis which competed with MP3 and AAC just fine.
As for video research being expensive, you're right, of course. We're probably seeing much increased funding in FOSS codecs now compared to all previous decades.
Vorbis became competitive with MP3 and AAC many years after those commercial codecs were introduced. So again, the FOSS codec was nowhere near state-of-the-art.
I 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.
The only thing I know of is Intel's upcoming RocketLake which has AV1 acceleration. It _looks_ like it's both encoding and decoding.
It's exciting to see more mainstream adoption of AV1 which will surely drive HW acceleration forward, but it's disappointing that Apple hasn't been more proactive here.
Netflix is already testing AV1 in production. If you enable test participation you may receive AV1 streams right now. Youtube is also now sending AV1 streams, including to newer smart TVs.
I'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.
Video encoding is a modeling and search problem. Codecs try lots of different ways to represent the input data and do their best. You can evaluate the costs and benefits of each piece of the encoder to decide which parts to have on or off.
Obviously a speed-tuned AV1 compressor won't achieve maximum efficiency, but it might still perform better than an H264 or H265 compressor since it has more efficient tools available to it.
> 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.
> On phones I think less so right now, if you're talking about using AV1 to get noticeably better rates than VP9.
Yes, otherwise what would be the point of using AV1 in the first place. Many (most?) Android phones already have hardware VP9 and HEVC encoders. iPhones only support HEVC, so you know what the choice has to be to maximize the compatibility. HEVC and VP9 offer pretty much identical subjective visual quality for a given bitrate for the purpose of video calling - I tested a lot.
But anyway, even if you were able to run a realtime software-only AV1 encoder on a phone, there's still the concern of heat and battery life. Mobile devices usually aren't designed to run at 100% CPU load for any kind of extended period of time. Hardware codecs are much more power-efficient.
Don'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.
It'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).
I 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.
They 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.
I 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.
I 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.
There'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.
If 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.
I 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?
My colleague had been invited to visit both Apple and Google (former CERN employee). He said the contrast was very stark. In Google everyone was young and looked like they where having fun, at Apple where the old grumpy gray-beards with decades behind them.
And he would usually his story with: -And I've been an Apple-fanboy ever since.
That is a China problem, not a Duo problem. Sadly Google is not the company it once was, and has taken steps in the wrong direction, but it clearly has the moral high ground on this front.
I 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.)
The 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?
Duo 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.
Nah, 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.
Most 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.
We 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!
Seems 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.
Solving 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.
How 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).
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.
great 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.....
Does 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.
What reason does Google, apple, or Facebook have to lie?
What is the threat model that starts with "we claim to e2e encrypt traffic but don't so that..."?
Storing all the video isn't feasible, not is analyzing it in real time, so the only sensible threat model is targeted attacks, but the companies have no reason to do that. Governments do, but this makes the companies resistant to governments.
> Storing all the video isn't feasible, not is analyzing it in real time, so the only sensible threat model is targeted attacks, but the companies have no reason to do that. Governments do, but this makes the companies resistant to governments.
Analyzing the audio stream of a video call is possible in real time, in fact Google meet already does it to offer closed captioning in real time (the only good feature meet has compared to other alternatives)
Let'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)
i have, and i agree that they've gotten really good. but my customers are still completely lost when they have to interact with theirs in any way. No matter how good the UI is, it still requires a mental model of how a router works (for example: the internet comes into your house on a wire, the box turns it into wifi, which comes out the antennas) that a lot of people just don't have.
There's an understanding that there's a box with blinky lights and without it there's no internet. You can't assume people understand anything beyond that.
Duo 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)
