A macbook with a built-in webcam doesn't provide robust and low-power hardware encoding for video that camera captures? I should see battery life plummet if I use Quicktime to record video through it, then... right? There shouldn't exist battery efficient screencast apps for these computers... right?
I don't think this excuse flies on anything made in the last 10 years, at least, except maybe trash-tier netbooks or something. Unless the software is so amateurish that it doesn't even try to negotiate a codec that suits the hardware it's running on, and just picks something evidently-poorly-supported no matter what.
Good points. You have successfully made me revisit my assumptions!
I know that intel macbooks added hardware encoding from iphones into the T2 chip in part to solve this problem, but I also know that intel has quick sync, which should provide hardware encoding as well, and I didn't know what the pros/cons are. according to this article [1] the T2 chip seems to be much faster than intel quick sync, so that could be a factor, but it doesn't seem to cover power efficiency.
From a timeline perspective, Intel quick sync has been around on at least some Intel CPUs since 2011 and has been supported on osx since Mountain Lion (2012)[2], and the T2 chip first appeared in the Macbook pro in 2017 [3].
That would point to there being more at play than just absence of hardware video decoder. So I think you are right. At least _some_ hardware that can encode video efficiently has existed on macbooks for a while, and it seems like video conferencing applications should be taking advantage of it.
While it is always possible that the hardware could solve this problem, but the software doesn't make use of it, I have a feeling any software that did have correct use of encoding hardware would have gained a lot of marketshare, and people would be talking about it.
My next followup questions would be:
1) Were these computers in fact using hardware encoding, but the efficiency was not good enough for long battery life?
2) Is there some limitation to QuickSync and possibly other hardware solutions that makes them impractical for realtime use? Possibilities include:
- Maybe they are throughput optimized, and to work efficiently must take in large chunks of data at a time, which could increase latency beyond what would be acceptable for video calling
- Maybe they can't simultaneously do video decode and encode (it seems at least some generations of QuickSync couldn't do this)
- Maybe the hardware encoding isn't configurable enough to provide a low bandwidth typically used for video conferencing.
I was unable to find answers to these in ~1h of googling. Would love it if someone here knows.
I don't think this excuse flies on anything made in the last 10 years, at least, except maybe trash-tier netbooks or something. Unless the software is so amateurish that it doesn't even try to negotiate a codec that suits the hardware it's running on, and just picks something evidently-poorly-supported no matter what.