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Ask HN: What frustrates you most about video conferencing tools?
4 points by ud0 14 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
I work at a FAANG and have spent the last 5+ years building video conferencing tools. I hacked together a Chrome extension to fix my video colour. I planned to add more features: local recordings, on-device AI transcripts and summaries, and clean screenshots of screen shares. Then my company shut down our in-house tool and moved to Zoom. Around the same time, I joined a new team and had to onboard, which is when I realised I truly needed these features. In technical meetings, I often want to capture a screenshot of a shared screen or record a brief explanation that transcripts miss, with permission, of course.

With Zoom, I'm unable to do any of it because of Admin controls. Many AI notetakers exist, but few run locally, and wiring a Chrome plugin into Zoom is messy. These things are easy & possible, so it frustrates me every time I join a call.

What do you find painful about video conferencing? And if you could design a Zoom/Teams/Google Meet alternative from scratch, what would it do for you?





My needs are simple. I typically share my screen and walk people through what I see. I switch between Zoom and Teams and am trying to give a demo at the same time.

As I am talking and clicking at the same time, little things throw off my train of thought. 1) I wish the share screen icon is bigger than the other icons so I can find it quicker 2) I wish the share screen pop up menu is smaller. When I share screen this additional pop up menu appears and it always blocks what I am trying to demo.

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I've used https://bigbluebutton.org/ and https://jitsi.org/ in browser (Firebox) this month and they were "good enough". I rarely do conference calls, much less than a typical FAANG employee. Most of my frustration with Zoom, Team, Google Meet is their complexity. They also seem to keep changing, open too many notifications, try to get me to download something. Again, I rarely use them, only if a customer or partner company insists.

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Makes sense. When you do have to jump on Zoom/Teams/Meet, what’s the part that slows you down the most, is it setup, figuring out controls, or just the constant prompts?

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No comments? I guess I'm not surprised that people don't know what they want.

I'm way out of date but I do know what I no longer have.

It would be pretty much the same thing as the video-calling app from the original Intel webcam in 1997.

Where each user installed the app locally and then it simply handled the 1:1 communication over the internet without relying on any remote servers at all. Especially not relying on browsers, even though almost everybody had the same kind of browser back then, it's even worse of an idea now that browsers are such a rapidly moving target.

Except to accomplish conferencing, you need many-to-many not just 1:1 and you're the expert on that. I do know there are a few UIs that have seen OK acceptance so I wouldn't worry about that stuff until there is a high-performance engine under the hood, relying only on processors, hardware, and OS features that have well stood the test of time without being subject to deprecation any time soon.

From the ground up it should be possible to make it backward-compatible with hardware and OS versions much further back than people think, without needing anything fancy, and ideally could also lend itself to better multi-platform ability.

One thing more I remember that was good, since Intel's app was for routine calling not just occasional conferencing, each user built up a "phone book" of everyone they communicated with (or manually entered), and later could just scroll through it when they wanted to call somebody again. One click and it would call the chosen party, if they answered you could start talking over the mic & headset right away while you waited for the video to buffer. Seamless really whether you were calling over the internet or even direct from dial-up to dial-up without the internet at all. You can only imagine how jerky and blurry the cam was over a slow connection, but that's all it was. You could double you processor speed from 100Mhz to 200Mhz and it wouldn't help, but at least the mouse and app response were still snappier than the average W10 PC these days after upgrading to W11. Since that had nothing to do with broadband speed, only programming skill.

Maybe for conferencing have the group select a moderator who sets their app to spawn a working dashboard, who single-handedly clicks on the participants from their list for the event in about the same way. Or punts it over to another participant if they have to leave the session early or take a break.

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