Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 279 posts

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#101

Post by varispeed »

crazygringo wrote: post #77

I just want to say that this is really actually kind of mind-blowing from an audio engineering perspective. Outputting audio from multiple laptops in the same room is easy. Perfectly syncing it is harder. Implementing echo cancellation across all of that is quite a bit trickier than regular single-device echo cancellation. But then treating all the laptop microphones as a kind of microphone array, having to deal with…

Also imagine that 44.1kHz on one laptop will not equal 44.1kHz on another or one can run at 96kHz and others on 44.1kHz etc. that means everything has to be dynamically resampled in realtime whilst preserving quality and low latency.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#102

Post by anon84873628 »

CitrusFruits wrote: post #47
stavros wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet frustrates me immensely because I can't just fullscreen someone sharing an HD screen onto my HD screen and get 1:1 pixels with an overlay of faces (like Zoom does). Instead, I have to either not be able to read small text, or awkwardly pan in the recently-added "zoom" view.

Yeah I feel like with a couple UI tweaks or options Meet would be the best by far. It's just so much more convenient and accessible than the others.

Just in case any Meet engineers are reading... It needs to let me put my self-view right under the webcam lens, so I can stare at myself and still be looking at the camera.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#103

Post by varispeed »

nevir wrote: post #5

Meet, to me, is the perfect balance of functionality and simplicity (as an end user). And features like this only make that more apparent. Zoom and Teams always frustrate me, even though they're what I use far more often. It's too bad that video conferencing is largely a game of who has the most boxes checked - IT admins and A/V folk are the ones that need to be convinced, and Meet just doesn't ...meet... their needs

The organisation I worked at used Meet until someone from Microsoft convinced them to use Teams.

Such a nightmare. Quality of meetings went downhill and employees were penalised for secretly using Meet for ad hoc meetings.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#104

Post by kccqzy »

moomoo11 wrote: post #32

Meet is nice, but could the screen sharing view just please take 100% height/width? I hate that I have to always manually tweak it through dev tools to make it usable. How many 400k TC engineers and misguided product managers does it take to make that change? FFS

It takes just one misguided product manager. It's easy at Google for one misguided product manager to derail a dozen engineers' work.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#105

Post by DrammBA »

moomoo11 wrote: post #32

Meet is nice, but could the screen sharing view just please take 100% height/width? I hate that I have to always manually tweak it through dev tools to make it usable. How many 400k TC engineers and misguided product managers does it take to make that change? FFS

Are you using firefox? I use this extension called Stylus that lets you write custom css for pages and automatically apply it when you visit the page. There's probably something similar for chromium browsers

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#106

Post by jasonvorhe »

behnamoh wrote: post #79
loosescrews wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true for meetings created with free gmail accounts. If use Google Workspace this limitation does not apply.

That's a shady tactic right there.

What's so shady about that? It's not like they're advertising a feature to free Gmail users only to up sell them to workspace?

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#108

Post by [deleted] »

varispeed wrote: post #101
crazygringo wrote: post #77

I just want to say that this is really actually kind of mind-blowing from an audio engineering perspective. Outputting audio from multiple laptops in the same room is easy. Perfectly syncing it is harder. Implementing echo cancellation across all of that is quite a bit trickier than regular single-device echo cancellation. But then treating all the laptop microphones as a kind of microphone array, having to deal with…

Also imagine that 44.1kHz on one laptop will not equal 44.1kHz on another or one can run at 96kHz and others on 44.1kHz etc. that means everything has to be dynamically resampled in realtime whilst preserving quality and low latency.

[deleted]

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#109

Post by jamesrr39 »

bongodongobob wrote: post #72
nevir wrote: post #5

Meet, to me, is the perfect balance of functionality and simplicity (as an end user). And features like this only make that more apparent. Zoom and Teams always frustrate me, even though they're what I use far more often. It's too bad that video conferencing is largely a game of who has the most boxes checked - IT admins and A/V folk are the ones that need to be convinced, and Meet just doesn't ...meet... their needs

As an "IT admin", it's not that I need convincing. It's that the rest of Googles "office" products are absolute amateur hour and support is non-existent.

> the rest of Googles "office" products are absolute amateur hour

Not quite sure about this. Gmail (both personal and company accounts) is IMO a great email client with loads of handy features, and I always felt Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/Drawings were well put together. Are they the best in class? I guess it depends what you are looking for. Could Drive be faster? Yes, that would be nice. But "amateur hour" sounds like we are simply using different products.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#110

Post by nytesky »

crazygringo wrote: post #77

I just want to say that this is really actually kind of mind-blowing from an audio engineering perspective. Outputting audio from multiple laptops in the same room is easy. Perfectly syncing it is harder. Implementing echo cancellation across all of that is quite a bit trickier than regular single-device echo cancellation. But then treating all the laptop microphones as a kind of microphone array, having to deal with…

Technically very impressive, and meets a real need. My office is still running telecom hardware from a decade ago, all the wireless mics have dead batteries, and is reluctant to replace since so many meetings are completely virtual, so why have custom in office hardware.

This essentially replaces that expensive proprietary hardware with a matrix of laptops, and essentially every user gets a mic.

But it only works on laptops right, not phones?

Post reply on HN