@icedquinn @r000t
Sure, that's gonna be the big issue. Not the dozen ram guzzling Chrome tabs, not the complete mess of unoptimized crap apps pass for these days, not Windows' bloat, nah, it's gonna be the video encoding of a low bitrate 720p video, that can be done through the GPU, that is the big problem.

@alyx @r000t they used to try and put dedicated encoding hardware in those although whether you can make use of them varies greatly.

do you happen to know if webshit actually even uses nvenc

and transmitting+mixing (if its a mixing server, which they try to move away from now because of the compute)+decoding isn't trivial either.

@alyx @r000t IIRC the current state of the art for hobo conferencing is peer to peer WebRTC where the clients are blind firing video packets at one another.

some of the older conference suites i ran in to (or optionally some new ones i guess?) used to receive all the video, merge it and send it back, but it was compute and bandwidth AF.

@alyx @r000t (all i'm saying is video actually is kinda expensive )

@icedquinn @r000t
1) It doesn't have to be. Only reason it does is: unoptimized crap apps.
2) What's the bigger issue: a piece of software you use for a few hours every once in a while, or the crap that runs all day long?

@alyx @icedquinn
>which software is the bigger issue

A laptop for a Zoom call consumes somewhere between 15-60 watts. Disabling the video capability of the call reduces, but doesn't eliminate this use.

At some one point, if you're turning off this and that basic feature to save electricity, why own a computer?

Also, Mrs. Natural Fibers more than outstripped her savings when she lengthened the conference call for 10 minute to blog about her dog and the church group and how she's saving the earth by not having video.

@r000t @alyx i knew people that had to sit through entire day long calls (this was pre-covid) because the person who ran the team used it to herd the cats.

@icedquinn @r000t
>do you happen to know if webshit actually even uses nvenc

I guess the real question there is how much of the GPU's hardware acceleration capabilities can browsers access.

Although, if you use webshit for video conferencing, instead of actual installable software, the issue goes back to using unoptimized crap and ram guzzling tabs in my view.
I forgot to put bloated, badly made websites into the original list. Webshit conferencing would also qualify.

@alyx @r000t i think most of the conferencing is webshit because of zoom's inexplicable popularity.

and then people looking for zoom alternatives are going to other webshit.

not a lot of conversation about xmpp+jingle or SIP.

WebRTC is actually not bad though.

@icedquinn @r000t @alyx
> WebRTC is actually not bad though.

Even considering that there is basically only one implementation of WebRTC used in production (at least for the browser/client side of things) and it's in that kind of shitty repo https://webrtc.googlesource.com/src/ ?

@lanodan @alyx @r000t i compiled janus recently and it didn't come from google.

@lanodan @alyx @r000t it's somewhat SCTP-over-DTLS-over-UDP which we could just avoid if ISPs were beaten over the head repeatedly until they allowed us to use native SCTP

@icedquinn
Zoom had the right name at the right time, imo.
@alyx