[wuunderbar]

There's two components to a Zoom call:

- Encoding: your own camera input.

- Decoding: decoding multiple streams of video.

Your CPU needs to do work on each on these, and depending on what codecs are used (and whether your CPU supports it) hardware acceleration may or may not be supported.

[MobileVet]

For sure, appreciate the break out.

I am just shocked that as big as Zoom is, they don’t have an optimized client for MacBooks. I suppose the market is still far smaller than PC based systems… but come on, Zoom at el have the resources.

[Teknoman117]

We Linux users get crushed by zoom, meet, teams, etc. as well. They’re all based on WebRTC and electron/chromium. We don’t get hardware decoding or encoding because Google doesn’t even want to attempt to support it. There are PRs for chromium going back 10 years.

I’m surprised WebRTC wouldn’t be hardware accelerated on macOS, especially considering the great lengths Apple has gone to to hide the hardware differences of the various machines behind CoreVideo, VideoToolbox, and AVFoundation.

Edit - For macOS, it may come down to the fact that WebRTC, being a Google project, prefers to use the VP9 codec. It doesn’t look like Apple enables the use of hardware accelerated VP9.

[MobileVet]

Thanks for sharing the specifics of the codecs in play. Definitely odd that something so prevalent isn’t accelerated.

[jbverschoor]

Don't forget about the rootkit :-)