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I work for Google, but not on anything related to Meet. I'm most excited about this because the video/audio quality is much higher.

When I use Zoom with friends, everyone is usually 320x240, or maybe 640x480 if there's only one person. Doom was 320x240 in 1993.

In Google Meet, I usually see people at 1280x920. A 4k monitor will fit 6 people at that resolution.

I value this higher resolution because it makes me feel more connected to people.




Is this the same service I'll have been using if my company has Google Suite and we've been using meet.google.com to run meetings? Asking because I've had the opposite experience - we've used Zoom for a few meetings recently and get massively better quality than we did on Meet, and I'm not sure what could be going wrong there. Or is this a new premium Meet service that's higher quality than both Meet and Zoom?

Zoom also displays a much much wider angle which feels like it explains the quality difference - the Meet one is a tiny portion of my webcam blown up and horribly artifacted.


meet.google.com is Google Meet, yep.


G Suite domain owner and manager here, huge fan. Using zoom and meet a lot these days. Zoom’s voice prioritization is very nice compared to Meet. And if the Brady Bunch view is coming, I welcome it.

My only other complaint is that my world (DoD health) blocks Most of G Suite.


Meet already has grid view, can show up to 16 people.


Does it ? I've looked and looked and looked for it. I'm not running Chrome/Windows though, so presumably I'm a second class citizen.


It released a week or two ago, so if you've been using Zoom recently, you might not have noticed. It's under the overflow in the bottom right > change layout.

I'm on Firefox/Mac and has worked fine for me.


yup, rollout date depends on the release schedule of your G-Suite domain https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/productivity-collabor...


I'm on MacOS/Firefox and it started showing a grid view for me a couple of weeks ago. I just assumed they were just rolling it out to replicate Zoom, but maybe it could have been configured somewhere on the G Suite side too.


I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.

The tech is not interesting, the UX is less interesting than Zoom or webex. The first hangout version was far more exciting than Google Meet, Duo or Latest-Hangouts.

Like every other industry, Google lost its ability to push boundaries forward and act as a beacon for innovation. "Higher resolution" is definitively not innovation.


> I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.

Do you meet people in person?


It's not really the same is it? Your face appearing an unknown size/quality to however many people are at the other end is a different experience.


How much innovation do we really need in this space. My primary request would be for higher fidelity - what do you feel is missing?


> I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.

I recall there being an option in settings where you can limit the send quality of the video.


> I'm not really excited that every meeting participant will be able to see my facial flaws in 4k HDR with dynamic surround.

Then you are a fool because high quality audio and video is not just a "nice to have" in video conferencing. It makes the difference between a phone-like conversation where you can just talk, and "I.. sorry.. after you. Ok so I was g.. no go on - what were you going to say? Sorry can you repeat that I can't hear you?"

That said, Zoom has been much better quality than Hangouts when I tried it. Do Meet and Duo use the same tech or does Google really have three different video conferencing systems?


fwiw, I have found video quality on Meet to be by far the worst out of any video chat app I've ever used. My company pays for g suite but all the video in my google meetings range between 320x240 and flip phone video from 15 years ago, and I swear I'm not exaggerating. This can happen even with a 2 person meeting. I've never had this issue with Zoom.


Weird, I have the opposite experience. Meet for years was much worse video/screen share resolution/latency/quality than Zoom or Gotomeeting. In fact it was so bad originally that a bunch of our team members requested we keeping paying for gotomeeting even though we had meet for free in GSuite.

It's gotten a bit better to the point it's mostly tolerable now, so we might actually switch over. Still, I wonder how much the web client is holding it back.


with most people working from home using the crappy webcam and mic they a don't have cam capable of doing 1280x920 or the bandwidth and/or computer capable of streaming at that res.


Nice try, Larry.




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