News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Say hello to Google Allo: a smarter messaging app. Parent comment

Re:Say hello to Google Allo: a smarter messaging app by spacehunt on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @02:25AM (#12545860)
What's the uplink speed on the other end (presumably 4Mbps is downlink)? That would be a more limiting factor in the quality of the video you see on your end.

But then I recall we had working video chat a decade ago with only a few hundred Kbps...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Say hello to Google Allo: a smarter messaging app by spdionis on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @02:49AM (#12545947)
> But then I recall we had working video chat a decade ago with only a few hundred Kbps...

This! Even in appear.in, which is one of the most stable, I encounter connection problems almost daily.

Is it because all these new apps have to go through the browser stack?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Say hello to Google Allo: a smarter messaging app by AstralStorm on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @03:22AM (#12546055)
No, WebRTC and codecs do support low bitrates. Someone got lazy coding the client.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Say hello to Google Allo: a smarter messaging app by spdionis on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @03:28AM (#12546086)
Given that I don't know anything about this domain, in my experience "supports" doesn't necessarily mean "supports well" or "there is no technical reason the browser stack slows this down, it's only the client's fault" or "would have been much easier to support in another stack without going through all this shit".

So I'm still not convinced.

[ Parent | on HN ]