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Hangouts Soon Upgrading to HD Video Chat, As well as Going to VP8 and WebRTC

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If you thought Google was done with Hangouts, think again. The folks at GigaOM has just gotten word that Google is in the process of upgrading to 720p HD video for hangouts and that a select group of people might already have HD video chat enabled. GigaOM got some information from Google on the latest Hangouts upgrade, which switches several protocols and uses more open standards so that Hangouts can eventually turn into a plugin-free chat service, now wouldn’t we all love that? As far as video is concerned, Google is dropping the proprietary, royalty-emcumbered H.264 codec for their own VP8. Back in 2010 when Google purchased On2 technologies, VP8 was acquired and open sourced. This new codec will require significantly less processing power, which Google is stating will enable most computers to handle 10 720p video streams at once. Additionally, it should also enable higher-quality, lower-bit-rate streams across the board. The H.264 plugin will still be supported for browsers that