silent Hangouts

As part of working from home, there’s a lot of discussion of various conferencing apps.

I’ve been using Skype successfully for a while, but haven’t been able to get Google Hangouts to work: video fine, people can hear me, but I can’t hear them.  And since Skype works, I’ve been defaulting to that.

But now there’s going to be a lot more remote conferencing, and work is defaulting to Hangouts.

So today, I bit the bullet, and spent time trying to diagnose the issue.

1) Another computer in another room – it can hear me, I can’t hear it.  My speakers, or its microphone?  When I test my speakers in Hangouts, they work.  But so does the microphone on the other machine.

2) Try it on my laptop instead.  Same issue.

3) Try it on my phone.  I can hear that.  So it’s not the other machine’s microphone.  And at least I have a workaround if needed.

4) What’s common between my main machine and laptop, but not my phone?  Chrome.  So, try it on Firefox on the laptop.  It works!  So, it’s a Chrome issue, not a machine issue.  But Chrome and Hangouts are both Google.  Humph.

5) Googling suggests there might be an issue with a Chrome extension.  Fiddle around.  Discover that disabling “Disable HTML5 Autoplay” cures the problem, on both machines.

Yay!  I now have Hangouts working!

But YouTube videos now autoplay their followup video…