Google working to improve Meet and Zoom video calling performance on Chromebooks

Abner Li | Feb 4 2021 - 9:35 am PT

Remote learning today involves a lot of video calls, and Google is working to improve Meet, as well as Zoom, performance on Chromebooks. Efforts are focused on boosting program efficiencies and making live optimizations.

Making sure devices can handle video conferences all day while running various apps and software that require a lot of power is incredibly important. That’s why we’ve been focused on improving Chromebooks, so they can work harder in the background as teaching and learning proceed smoothly.

Google says it has “improved how Meet videos are streamed” on Chrome OS. Given that devices used in education often have base-level specifications, Google wants it so that video calls can be had “without affecting the performance of other apps,” while also allowing people to use more advanced features, like grid views. This involves making sure “audio and video data don’t require any unnecessary processing.”

Meanwhile, the company is working to make Meet dynamically adjust video resolution and frame rate in response to device performance, as well as network conditions. In practice, users multitasking might see those two aspects decrease to maintain overall video performance as users open other apps to multitask. Meet last month added a “Troubleshooting” menu to show real-time network and system performance stats.

Meet will now also adapt to the speed of your network by temporarily turning off some video feeds, to make sure you’re not interrupted if many people are using your connection at the same time.

In addition to improving Meet performance, engineering teams from Google and Zoom have been working jointly on similar “service enhancements” for Chromebooks.