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Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

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

#201

Post by shiandow »

stavros wrote: post #10
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

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.

Using Firefox you can use the PIP mode to put the presentation wherever you want at any size.

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

#202

Post by stavros »

shiandow wrote: post #201
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.

Using Firefox you can use the PIP mode to put the presentation wherever you want at any size.

Oh, really? I didn't realize I could detach the presentation element, thanks!

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

#203

Post by IshKebab »

nomel wrote: post #177
YZF wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't aware audio hardware on laptops can emit ultrasound. Aren't those filtered to be below 22KHz?

Most adults can’t hear > 18kHz. Related, there are devices you can buy to repel teenagers: https://www.today.com/news/controversial-mosquito-sonic-devi...

Yeah I'm pretty sure there are plenty of adults that can hear those frequencies though. It's not like everyone reaches 18 and suddenly loses hearing.

Stupid devices IMO. When they first came out I downloaded a sample audio file from the manufacturers website to see if I could hear it. I couldn't.... because they encoded it as MP3 and it was completely filtered out by the encoding! Literally an empty file.

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

#204

Post by IshKebab »

nradov wrote: post #21
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

This isn't an area where simplicity wins. Zoom is targeted more towards professional use whereas Meet is more for casual or social use. It doesn't really support multiple displays, like I can't watch screen sharing on one display while moving the chat and video windows off to another display. Scaling options for screen sharing are inadequate and it doesn't even support real full screen display. Meet lacks advanced au…

I think more critically it doesn't support remote control. I have no idea how they have missed that critical feature. Do people really enjoy "now scroll down, no a bit more... back a bit... there! stop!"??

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

#205

Post by dyauspitr »

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

Meet is perfect, I’ve always loved it. Slick and not bulky. Works beautifully in the browser. Simple features that work seamlessly. The ability to share single chrome tabs is a godsend. Zoom has always felt like a clunky product to me.

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

#206

Post by iruoy »

makeitdouble wrote: post #167
dgellow wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Meet calls always end up pixelated, where Zoom looks perfect. That’s basically the only thing I care about after the audio quality, I often cannot read someone’s screen when shared via Meet. Zoom also feels lower latency but I never checked if that’s the case. Note sure if that’s because I’m not in the US.

You might be hitting QOS limitations where traffic from Google is bundled with YouTube et al and served at a lower priority ? In my experience Zoom is always slightly better, but at a nitpicking level. I use meet day in day out, and fallback to whatever we have in hand if it's unworkable (pixelation would hit that line), and never saw zoom or Skype or discord being significantly better at these times.

That would be against net neutrality laws here in The Netherlands, but we also get low bitrates when screensharing.

But Google Meet is pretty good otherwise. Zoom is good too. All others I have used have been quite annoying to use.

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

#207

Post by The_Colonel »

alkonaut wrote: post #45
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

It very rarely matters which product is "better" in any objective sense. If you are team that work with Teams, your meetings will be on teams. Teams could be much worse than Zoom or Meet, you wouldn't move your group from Teams for one meeting anyway.

In a big corp, when organising a meeting, we can choose between google meet, webex, slack (huddle) and zoom. I don't know why, but it is what it is.

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

#208

Post by The_Colonel »

pachico wrote: post #26

GitLab offers a nice course about transitioning to remote work. One of the items in their guidelines about online meeting is not having hybrid meetings. This is, all those attending must attend from their own device rather than the meeting room one (see Jabra) precisely for the reasons this feature tries to address.

It's optimizing for the lowest common denominator. When a majority of the team is present in office, it's silly to downgrade the experience for everyone.

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

#209

Post by whoknowswho »

dathery wrote: post #139
iandanforth wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think they are using some kind of inaudible-to-humans signal to coordinate this or is the unmodified audio good enough?

I could see this happening. Zoom for example already uses ultrasonic sound to detect what conference room a laptop is in for one-click screen sharing.

Teams does it too, I've had meetings where I've been able to audibly hear it coming from devices

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

#210

Post by boffinAudio »

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…

I agree that this is amazing - but what I don't like about it, is the fact that a 3rd party is doing this, when it should really be a built-in feature of the operating system - or at least, be implemented as close to the device as possible. From what I can glean from this breathless press release, this functionality requires a fair bit of cloud ... anathema to audio professionals, but maybe not so, the professional management classes.

Too many times these kinds of services are wrapped up at the application layer, where really they belong in the operating system. For example, wouldn't this be a perfect thing to implement as a plugin for Pulseaudio, or JACK, or even .. VST?

(Disclaimer: I work on high end microphone and audio products at a well-known hardware manufacturer of such, where much more effort is being made to make the devices, themselves, smarter ..)

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