61–70 of 114 posts
Hangouts over taxes just about any machine, it's ridiculous. FCP exporting a 4k video uses less CPU than Hangouts does to show a choppy video feed.
Are you using Chrome? Apparently under Safari Hangout uses much less CPU.
Hangouts is awful in general...it heats up even very powerful computers in the process of showing pixellated, glitchy video with distorted audio, even over a very low latency 200 megabit connection. We use it every day for work and its a source of constant frustration. Honestly I'd prefer a conference call on a landline, we have the video off most of the time anyway because it seems to cause more audio dropouts when…
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I had the original rMBP, now the 2014 one, and don't see the same problem. A lot of it is in the persistent services that are running on the machine; I'd take a good look at Activity Monitor's "energy" pane. One thing I noticed: if you're using Chrome and have persistent pages open (cough, GMail, cough), this is probably a big part of your general heat issues. It made me go back to Firefox for a while, but Firefox's…
Safari handles those cases like a pro.
Hangouts is awful in general...it heats up even very powerful computers in the process of showing pixellated, glitchy video with distorted audio, even over a very low latency 200 megabit connection. We use it every day for work and its a source of constant frustration. Honestly I'd prefer a conference call on a landline, we have the video off most of the time anyway because it seems to cause more audio dropouts when…
edit: only applied to hangout
Every system should come with a simple task monitor installed and running in a visible place, e.g. an icon in the Mac menu bar. Yes I know about the Activity Monitor - it's not enough.
It's basically like being sold a car without the engine oil temperature gauge.
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I use hangouts daily and unless I'm on a high end PC I switch to audio only to avoid the jet turbine effect. They really need to optimize.
Video encoding is expensive. You get to pick between more CPU usage or worse video quality.
Playing the same video fullscreen in something like Media Player Classic would result in negligible CPU usage since it wasn't going through Flash's 2D engine + software scaler, and instead your video card would handle the scaling with ease.
Hardware scaling using overlays is very old technology, so it was kind of sad that from mid to late 2000s, internet video was being hampered by poor software scaling.
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Are you using Chrome? Apparently under Safari Hangout uses much less CPU.
This seems highly doubtful. They are both Google's code - one is just packaged as a plugin rather than built into Chrome.
Notice this is coming from a user who did not even use a task monitor first. He writes in a followup post that he had a task maxing his CPU on the background. Every system should come with a simple task monitor installed and running in a visible place, e.g. an icon in the Mac menu bar. Yes I know about the Activity Monitor - it's not enough. It's basically like being sold a car without the engine oil temperature gaug…
View -> Dock Icon -> *
* CPU Usage
* CPU History
* Network Usage
* Disk Activity
The 'garbled microphone input' seems a bit of a red herring, it's likely that the thermal throttling is kicking in which is causing the audio recording app to get slowed to below real time making it sound like garbled. I've had the laptop for about a month now, and yes, Hangouts will bring it to its knees, but for some reason Hangouts will bring just about any laptop to its knees. Battery life is as advertised, you d…
I've got a couple year old x1 carbon 13", and it handles hangouts fine, more or less everyday. That's with the (annoyingly high) cpu usage of a couple hundred tabs open as well. If a tiny couple pound ultrabook van easily handle hangouts, I highly doubt that hangouts would be difficult on most laptops (let alone "just about any").
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The 15" rMBP will apparently throttle if you load the CPU + discrete GPU at the same time. That said, I have no use for GPU, and I've been pretty impressed by how cool it stays given the thin profile and quad-core CPU.
Do the fans stay at a pretty consistent level, or do they throttle a lot from quiet to noisy? I'm thinking of getting one, but the people I know who have them tend to use them in noisy environments and can't answer my questions.