Ask HN: Are there good self-hosted video conference tools?
You need a <i>lot</i> of GPU time to run a decent video conferencing system.<p>That's because every video feed usually needs to be realtime, low-latency transcoded to match the receivers bandwidth requirements.  If some people in the meeting are on 3G while others are on fast internet, you can't send the same data to all of them!  You can't send the same to all of them if different client devices have different hardware video encoders/decoders.  Start doing software decoding and you'll soon end up draining users batteries like Zoom!<p>In a 10 person meeting, thats 10 incoming video feeds, and 100 outgoing video feeds.  Not many machines can encode 100 video feeds in realtime!   Obviously you can skimp on quality a bit and bucket users (ie. we'll have a high, a mid, and a low res feed, and just pick which to send).<p>For all the above reasons, that tends to be why self-hosted video conferencing systems are kinda laggy and gobble battery and have poor client support.<p>Big companies offering hosted VC solutions tend to have dedicated video encoding chips, so they can cheaply make hundreds of video streams to send to every participant.