
What if we made video conferencing work? - douche
http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2017/05/01/just-made-video-conferencing-work/
======
mikekchar
Having worked in VOIP for a good part of my career, there aren't actually that
many hurdles left. The biggest one is IPV6. Once that is pervasive, then you
have an easy way to get end to end connectivity without having use a central
server to carry the content. This is really, really massive because no matter
how big you are, the central server is just adding latency -- sometimes a huge
amount.

The next bit is finding a good UX for doing audio setup. Right now automatic
gain control is just broken. The vast majority of problems that people have
(after having no audio at all) is that the audio is set up badly. If you want
to see how good audio can be in a VOIP situation, take a few minutes setting
up mumble properly and talk to someone. It's incredible.

Those 2 things will solve virtually every audio problem because most of the
really pathological cases where echo cancellation breaks are initiated by
those 2 things. However, for doing video conferencing where you have lots of
people, you probably need a hardware solution. This hardware already exists,
but it doesn't talk to any voip software that I know about (granted I've been
out of the business for a decade). Anybody really serious about this market
needs to build hardware (or better yet, pair with someone willing to build
commodity hardware to open standards).

Video? It's really no problem. It can lag for _seconds_ and it's totally fine.
All of the serious problems are audio.

~~~
jherdman

      > ... there aren't actually that many hurdles left. The biggest one is IPV6. Once that is pervasive, then you have an easy way to get end to end connectivity without having use a central server to carry the content...
    

I'm not really a networking pro. Could you ELI5 why IPv6 is such a magic
bullet for VOIP?

~~~
auganov
IPv6 means every device can have a globally routable, unique address. Hence
bypassing the need for relay or hole punching servers.

On a side note, I don't believe it to be a major problem in this context
though.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I'm pretty sure I'll still have a firewall between my IPv6 devices and the
internet.

~~~
auganov
Right, IPv6 gives you no guarantee that you'll be reachable. What default
firewalling should look like is still an ongoing discussion.

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guitarbill
Even the best video conferencing software (codecs, etc) is no match for an
unreliable network with zero latency guarantees. Otherwise we would have done
this already. But you can't buffer video calls.

Who knows, maybe with net neutrality gone ISPs will provide priority traffic
so companies can pay more for better video conferencing (whatever better
means). And rich people can pay for better Netflix. We can dream and look on
the bright side, right? I just hope you aren't a video conferencing startup,
because $megacorp already has an exclusive with the ISPs for video
conferencing on this priority network...

(On a serious note, I mention this because it's part of the age-old network
traffic prioritisation debate, not to start a flame war about net neutrality.
That includes the downside of prioritisation, too)

~~~
pjc50
> Not to start a flame war about net neutrality

Too late!

I've never been convinced that lack of prioritisation is the real obstacle to
videoconferencing. It's usability. The only videocall application that's ever
achieved decent popularity seems to be FaceTime.

Mind you, one-way videoconferencing is becoming very popular these days in the
form of "streamers".

There are also non-technical usability questions - like phones, the social
cues are subtly different to same-room conversations, and potentially
frustrating when it comes to the delicate dance of getting the other person to
let you talk.

~~~
mysterydip
Sounds like an idea for an app: each side of the call gets 60 seconds to
speak, then is automatically muted and the other side opened. Or do it the
speed chess way and have a button you press when you're done with your thought
so you can "bank" time for a later point of conversation.

~~~
adrianN
Replace the button with voice recognition and let the people say "over" when
they're done talking.

~~~
notahacker
Dropped calls every time you utter the word "over" don't sound like a
usability enhancement

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mathw
There are a lot of comparisons here which don't make any sense. It's not the
same people making HoloLens work (which may be overblown, since not many
people have had heads-on time with one to report back) and making Skype so
awful, because Microsoft is huge and have different teams doing different
things and some of those teams are clearly better than others or get their
priorities set by people more in line with what the author would want than
others.

Likewise at Google, Hangouts and self-driving cars won't share any people.
Especially as their self-driving cars are now handled by a different company,
Waymo, who have the same parent company as Google.

I get the point that it's astonishing that videoconferencing tech is still so
awful. I remember interviewing at Google's London office years ago and two of
the interviews were done by video links, and they worked flawlessly - but this
very impressive conference system was one Google had bought in from somewhere
and presumably paid ridiculous sums of money for. That experience gave me hope
for consumer video tech - but it's now ten years later and where are we?

FaceTime seems to work, but it only works between Apple devices. Google Duo
seems to work in my limited experimentation, but only works between phones
running the Duo app, because Google have more hands that don't know what any
of the other hands are doing than just about anybody else - especially in the
consumer communications arena.

I wish someone would get their pants on and seriously invest in sorting out
video calling.

Heck, getting audio to work reliably would be good. Best one for that
currently in my experience? Slack.

~~~
mulletbum
I would like to add to the first part of your comment that it seems lots of
people don't understand how teams in a company work as well. You can't pull
people off the HoloLens team and expect them to make huge leaps on the Skype
team. If someone is in love with their HoloLens work, drive that forward, they
might not be in love with Skype. Thus you have situations where new
breakthroughs are hard to come by. I would think working on Skype is not
nearly as exciting as HoloLens. #1 because I am sure Microsoft has to be
insanely protective of the platform and not make large changes all at once.
Not the case with HoloLens.

~~~
imron
What you can do however is say to the hololens team that one of their
priorities is to have a killer avatar based augmented reality video-
conferencing app and that it's going to be one of the core drivers of the
product so they better make sure it works and works well.

It doesn't need to be built on Skype (and preferably wouldn't), but they
should be looking at that as a core market for the product.

A few months back I was talking to a friend, whose company was paying him to
fly to the UK to host a week of training or something similar, and we
calculated that the cost of flying and accommodating him for the week would
have been equivalent to purchasing PCs and VR gear for all participants.
Except of course there wasn't really any software up to the task of virtual
conferencing.

------
stephencanon
Aside:

"Can you imagine the outrage that would occur in Palo Alto California if
anybody presumed to keep chickens in their back yards?"

When we lived in Palo Alto (~2008-2011), we had about twenty chickens and
three goats. The neighbors all loved them. There are some ways in which Palo
Alto is a pretty weird place, but almost all the people there are just like
people anywhere else.

~~~
emodendroket
In a lot of places I think people would not appreciate chickens.

~~~
pjc50
Chickens are fine if you keep them clean. Cockerels in an urban area will get
you anything from a noise abatement order to a drive-by shooting.

------
davecap1
There are a bunch of options for low-latency video conferencing solutions
available for people who actually need it (tele-medicine/surgery, sports/media
broadcasting, enterprise conferencing). The thing is they just cost a lot of
money and require dedicated hardware. Here's one company I know of that does
this: [http://www.haivision.com/](http://www.haivision.com/)

------
Symbiote
We have a Polycom conferencing camera (CX5000), which seems to be something
originally designed by Microsoft and called Roundtable. It works well,
including for international calls — we have regular calls using Skype without
issue to Canada and Taiwan from Europe, and irregular calls elsewhere.

It does have an essentially perfect 1Gb/s Internet connection.

This is the current version: [http://www.polycom.com/products-
services/products-for-micros...](http://www.polycom.com/products-
services/products-for-microsoft/lync-optimized/cx5100-unified-conference-
station.html)

~~~
pidg
We have a couple of Polycom CX5000s too - the second one we had to source from
eBay! We use Skype for Business for 100% of our voice and video communication,
and have virtually no trouble with it.

Any problems in my experience stem from remote users' ISP bandwidth issues, or
their inability to read instructions. No complaints about SfB.

I wonder if the author is using Skype for Business or the consumer Skype.

~~~
darklajid
We're using Skype for Business and it's a daily source of issues. Call quality
is often terrible and - unrelated to the audio/video aubject - screen sharing
is so laggy that it is literally unusable most of the time ("Please click over
there. _wait for visual update_ "Now do..").

Another fun issue is that you cannot directly paste stuff without starting a
conversation. It will block your message as "too long" most if the time,
unless you write something meaningless and short first. "Hey. Skype sucks.
Incoming error I need your help with:".

------
nradov
Part of the problem is that the camera is positioned _above_ the display, so
the person on the other end isn't looking you in the eyes. It's a bit
disconcerting.

Perhaps someone will invent a one-way transparent display where the camera
will look out from behind the middle of the monitor. Alternatively, we could
position multiple cameras around the edges of the display and then use real-
time video processing software to combine those streams into a single
synthetic video which makes it appear as if the person is looking at you.

~~~
dhimes
So I'll have a post-it note in the middle of my monitor :)

------
TorKlingberg
I guess this is a fair time to promote the Video Conferencing startup(-ish)
I'm working for: StarLeaf [https://www.starleaf.com](https://www.starleaf.com)

The author never say exactly what they want fixed, but we sure know most VC
systems are a horrible mess. We spend a lot of effort on UX and making good
quality calls work through NATs and random packet loss.

The main products are meeting room solutions, which tends to be least well
server by free offerings. Squeezing everyone in front of a laptop is never
great.

------
return0
Author is bashing VR but what if conferences in 3d environments are a better
solution than skype? People use 3d / metaverse solutions for education for
example, because it's a compelling solution. A gaming environment may in fact
be more productive than looking at 100 thumbnails of participant faces.

~~~
beaconstudios
video conferencing is appealing because we communicate as much through body
language and facial cues as by voice. We evolved to communicate face-to-face
and end up missing out on a lot of information if we only represent ourselves
with our voices and a visual avatar.

~~~
Nemo157
A large part of the body language component is reproducible today with hand
trackers + head orientation. In terms of facial cues there have been some
interesting demos with gaze tracking being reproduced onto the visual avatar.

~~~
beaconstudios
but have we gotten past the uncanny valley yet? I've seen this attempted
previously but it always seems very "off" in a way that engenders distrust.
When we could just fix video streaming, it seems redundant to try to
accurately replicate body language in a 3d avatar.

------
hprotagonist
>The real coffin-nail for videophony involved the way callers' faces looked on
their TP screen, during calls. Not their callers' faces, but their own, when
they saw them on video.

>This sort of appearance check was no more resistible than a mirror. But the
experience proved almost universally horrifying. People were horrified at how
their own faces appeared on a TP screen. It wasn't just 'Anchorman's Bloat,'
that well-known impression of extra weight that video inflicts on the face. It
was worse. Even with high-end TPs' high-def viewer-screens, consumers
perceived something essentially blurred and moist-looking about their phone-
faces, a shiny pallid indefiniteness that struck them as not just unflattering
but somehow evasive, furtive, untrustworthy, unlikable.

>The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry's psychological
consultants termed Video-Physiognmoic Dsyphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the
advent of High-Definition Masking. Mask-wise, the initial option of High-
Definition Photographic Imaging — i.e. taking the most flattering elements of
a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and ‚
thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the
cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly
attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face wearing an earnest,
slightly overintense expression of complete attention.

>It turned out that consumers' instinctively skewed self-perception, plus
vanity-related stress, meant that they began preferring and then outright
demanding videophone masks that were really quite a lot better-looking than
they themselves were in person.

>Even then, of course, the bulk of U.S. consumers remained verifiably
reluctant to leave home and teleputer and to interface personally, though this
phenomenon's endurance can't be attributed to the videophony-fad per se, and
anyway the new panagoraphobia served to open huge new entrepreneurial
teleputerized markest for home-shopping and -delivery, and didn't cause much
industry concern.

\--infinite jest (1996)

------
Angostura
The question this article raises for me is - would people really object if you
kept hens in a Palo Alto back garden? I keep chickens in London and I've never
had complaints.

------
manyoso
This is a great rant, but what are the best solutions to this today? Has
someone, somewhere solved this or at least well on their way to a solution?

~~~
shady-lady
Can't speak as to how it scales but I had to use both webex and Zoom in the
past year. Paid corporate accounts etc.. No affiliation to either.

Webex linux support is unbelievably poor(literally, greater than a 1/2 days
work to get it installed on linux). Sound quality deteriorates on
international calls. Just really crappy experience overall.

Zoom has rpms/deb packages available. Installation- 30 secs.. Sound quality
was crystal clear on international calls.

Webex is one of the few product offerings that makes me truly angry.

~~~
manyoso
Last few months I have used Zoom, RingCentral, Skype for Business, Google
Hangouts, and Gotomeeting.

Zoom was best followed by gotomeeting.

~~~
akie
I really like [https://appear.in](https://appear.in) \- simple, straight-
forward, and "just works". Don't know how well it works for more than two
people, though. You can add screensharing with a Chrome plugin. It's all I
need, really.

~~~
motdiem
we use appear.in daily - it works well up to 5 people. It also has an
interesting feature to allow you to "mute" certain participants, which works
well in our use case where some participants can be in the same physical room.
On "older" (say 2012 macbook pro), it easily pegs chrome at 100% CPU though

Paid Zoom works generally well, and much better on mobile than alternatives -
you can also record meetings, and the recordings are of decent quality.

------
shansinha
Hi Everyone: Am a little late to the thread.

I am the founder / CEO of Highfive. One of the companies implicated in Alex's
post :-)

I know some in the YC community checked out Highfive early in our maturity
curve when we released our product 2 years ago. I would love for folks here to
try it out again and tell us what they think.

I took a few minutes to write up a few lessons we have learned over the last
4.5 years. It's definitely been harder than anything I've ever worked on.
Would love your thoughts.

[https://highfive.com/10-reasons-video-conferencing-still-
suc...](https://highfive.com/10-reasons-video-conferencing-still-sucks/)

------
pdimitar
This has to be the best non-tech-documentation piece I've ever read on Hacker
News. The author makes great points with a well-placed sarcasm.

I know, I know. Corporations go where the money flows, and they don't want to
change the status quo if there's no money in that revolution (case in point:
not attacking the rental cars / hotels / airlines). I am well aware.

But the author is still very correct on a conceptual level.

------
kshitij_libra
Apart from bigbluebutton are there any other open-source video conferencing
solutions out there ?

Rather than so many different versions of flawed product. I wonder how things
would work out if a lot of creative individuals solved and made better the
same problem.

Also, I think another pain point is that webcam and audio setup is tricky to
most `windows` pc average user, is there a product that helps figure out the
quality score of your setup and potentially help with it ?

------
BatFastard
The fix for video conferencing is AR, I have been video conferencing for 20
years, and after the couple minutes of introductions, the video feed is not
needed 99% of the time.

Screen sharing on the other hand is great, just about always need that. But we
really don't have to be looking at each other constantly.

So stop trying to fix something that is inherently not needed.

------
m0dest
Those Piperchat guys are onto something!

~~~
nickpeterson
I think there might be some legal issues with their tos...

------
andreapaiola
as seen on Silicon Valley...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YOEEpWAXgU)

------
nottorp
No thanks. If video conferencing starts to work, my customers will start to
ask for it. And the loss of productivity will dwarf the annual spending on
business trips.

You executives can go on and fly, don't ruin work for everybody else.

