In April 2023, the Mountain View company announced support for chiamate Full HD 1080p in Google Meet. Until now, however, the functionality was limited to 1:1 video calls, which do not involve more participants. With an announcement that appeared recently on the Google blog, the company points out that calls to higher resolution they become possible even when three or more people participate. However, the news concerns, at least for the moment, only users who use a account businesssuch as Google Workspace subscribers.
The 1080p resolution is disabled by default: users who have cameras capable of handling Full HD will see a prompt appear before the video conference starts. The dialog box shown by Google allows you to choose whether to activate the 1080p stream and improve video qualitycompatibly with the available network bandwidth.
We suggest testing your webcam to see what features it offers and whether it supports 1080p resolution.
An intelligent system that enables Full HD calling only when really needed
Google points out that in the case of group video calls started on Meet, the application still enables 1080 resolution only when the video stream is displayed in a large area of the screen. Conversely, when a user’s video stream is confined to a small box on the display, Meet refrains from using Full HD.
Not only. Google Meet adjusts data flows based on network conditions and available bandwidth. If the system detects situations of congestion or inadequate performance to transmit Full HD video, the video quality it is automatically adjusted, adapting it to the potential of the connection in use. Meet can work with all networks that can provide stably at least 300 kbps bandwidth: in this case, however, the quality of the video conference will be rather poor. In any case, the latency must be less than 50 ms when the command is launched ping 8.8.8.8.
In another article we saw how much network bandwidth is needed for video streaming. In the case of Google Meet, the exact amount of bandwidth required for a 1080p video conference can vary based on several factors. On the hardware requirements page, Google simply states that at least 2.6 Mbps is required for a 1:1 Meet HD (not Full HD) video call; for a group video conference with up to 5 participants 3.2 Mbps. The bandwidth requirements for Full HD calls are higher.