I shall suggest Jitsi Meet again soon ;).
Zoom and GoToMeeting offer the option for for these backgrounds without needing to do a green screen or anything. Yes, the backgrounds are insanely silly. Like a stock photo of a beach, outer space, a meadow, etc.. I don’t know why one of these companies isn’t smart enough to just put a picture of an empty room as one of the backgrounds. Yes you can tell that the user is using a background still, and it occasionally clips the background wrong for a few seconds, especially during sudden subject movement, but it does largely protect employee’s embarrassment which is a legitimate reason to offer it.
The absolute best implimentation of this background thing is Microsoft Teams’ video chat platform. It does a “blur” background that actually looks pretty good. It is an extreme blur that makes it almost impossible to tell what is in the background, but it looks sort of like a high end camera with low depth of field. Obviously it isn’t going to fool anyone into actually thinking it is real, but it is the least-distracting and most appealing option I have seen yet. Kudos to Microsoft for that one.
Here is what the Microsoft Teams one looks like: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/blur-your-backgroun...
(I have no dog in this fight, just sharing experience. I don’t work for Microsoft. Use whatever you guys want. I am just offering my 5 years of experience fighting with employees about video conferencing. I have heard all the problems with it, but the embarrassment of their background is always the biggest and most common one. Other common ones include wardrobe malfunctions (from employees getting dressed really quickly before a meeting), Significant others saying or doing embarrassing things on camera unknowingly, employees saying embarrassing things while thinking they are on mute, and so on. But the most common complaint is the stupid backgrounds.
I have also been sent in infinite loops of download installer, install, now go download installer again.
Seems like a stock slightly blurred image of a wall or bookshelf would be best option
The problem I have with the stock backgrounds is they impart a non-professional feel to the meeting....do i really want to show I’m mentally ‘sitting on the beach’ or ‘out in space’ while talking about who gets downsized?
It wouldn't make sense for other people using the feature to take any more processing power--I assume the video is encoded and processed the same either way.
Another poster mentioned though that Zoom required green screens for this feature on non-intel CPU machines.
However, as we were using it for work conference, I felt like I was adding some goofiness to the call and didn't like that. I ended up moving the camera to show less mess, and then eventually actually cleaned up my mess.
Plus, VCam only works in Windows.
Hangouts (now Meet) is better geared towards GSuite orgs where you're already logged into Google since you have to be to access almost all of your other internal company/school resources, including gmail. It also solves the contacts problem since everyone will be in the company directory.
Ah-ha! Google Hangouts Meet is indeed the GSuite video conferencing solution, complemented by Google Hangouts Chat, the GSuite Slack competitor. Google Hangouts is "deprecated" but still alive, and with a plain-old gmail account I don't see an option to use Hangouts Chat nor Hangouts Meet, only Hangouts. As a user in a GSuite org, Chat and Meet exist, and plain-old Hangouts text messages are mirrored in Chat, but the video conferencing is still weirdly separate from Meet.
You do not require a google account at all to join a Meets session, but someone in the session with a valid invite will have to approve your entry.
I test this quite often with incognito tabs to have multiple participants for room setup and testing.
There is no gallery view available for Google Hangouts (I've searched heavily for it in the past week, if it exists please enlighten me).
But there's a layout option in the vertical dots menu that will let you force it back to 4 large tiles. You cannot specify how many tiles, though, it's always 4.
I like to call this the "Hollywood Squares" view.
Where is the option in hangouts to tile equally? I've never found it and I hate the large speaker small others in some situations.
Meet (assuming you're on the current UI, which I would presume has been rolled out to everyone by now) can tile, but only up to four videos (excluding yourself, so five participants). Once you go above that, in automatic mode, it'll drop back to the view with a single large video of a person currently speaking, and smaller videos of everyone else on the side, and, if you force it into the grid view, only four are displayed at a time.
... but why? Is it just a familiarity thing?
That's the disheartening part. Most hadn't used Hangouts before, one person suggested it due to social distancing, ~1hr into Hangouts call as we're struggling to add another member I introduce Jitsi and paste a link into the group chat. Used for ~15 minutes, then dropped and the manual invite process for hangouts began again - organizer couldn't find the option to generate a sharable link to a Hangouts call (it does exist).
"I don't like it, it's weird."
To be fair, it is sort "busy" in regards to the UI and the stuff surrounding the screen.
Hangouts is comparatively less daunting.
[0] - https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standa...
Compared to the Acer I bough for $700 with a basic Nvidia card and upgradeable memory that can handle everything I throw at it. My last Acer ran fine for almost 6 years but I dropped it one too many times.
There are also lots of helpful people in the /r/hackintosh subreddit and discord if you run into troubles.
I was debating between building a hackintosh and buying the new MacBook pro and I can say 100% it was worth it.
Out of curiosity: can you compare it to Google Duo? Because it has the best quality and stability of any 1:1 product I've ever tried (never tried Facetime)
Madness.
It's getting long in the tooth by Google standards I suppose. Who knows when they'll axe it.
I think it's strictly 1:1 (which, I gather, Facetime isn't?). It has good video quality, but what I like most about it is that it's nicely resilient on dodgy connections.
I've often used it wandering around my garden, at the fringe of Wifi range, and it does the right thing: tries to stay on Wifi, but switches over to 4G if the connection becomes too dodgy, then back to Wifi once that's stable again. All of that with pretty minimal artefacts.
Seamless integration in the OS as long as you're in the Apple ecosystem and lightweight native clients (it seems to use hardware encoding/decoding does not make my fans spin like Zoom or any browser-based solution). No accounts or meeting/room IDs to remember or join, it just works with Apple IDs (which you're already logged into) or phone numbers for iOS devices (which work even if you somehow don't use an Apple ID).
But I imagine if your friends aren't nerds this is a real problem. My wife has to deal with it.
Onboarding: Jitsi: Click a URL. No accounts. Hangouts: Google account. Need to individually invite other Google accounts.
Video Quality: Jitsi: Decent, slightly better than hangouts. Hangouts: Passable but grainy.
Video Layout: Jitsi: Automatically big-screens current speaker, shows small screens of others. Has option to tile to equally size screens. Hangouts: Same.
Conclusion: Friends preferred Hangouts.
It's quite disheartening that "average users" shun 1 click URL room creation with superior video and audio quality for manually adding contacts. And that's without any considerations for free software vs. Google panopticon. They would rather tolerate a multi-step process of sharing gmail accounts, asking the same person for their email repeatedly.