Google Home Update time:
So I have some bad news and some better news.
Let’s start with the bad news first.
The Google Home Integration is not ready and we will need a little longer to get it ready. We have encounter some difficulty in securing the video only version despite the beta working properly. Most of the problems are coming from the audio part that does not work for the moment. We are coming to the conclusion that a fix is not going to be easy to achieve in the short term and this is not acceptable. So what we did during that time is try something radically different. We created a totally new version that does not use the HLS protocol but instead use MPEG-DASH. The new estimate is about end of the month for general release.
So what is the better news?
Switching to MPEG-DASH showed that the stream is stable even with the audio! So that is a great improvement/ You will also a light improvement in latency. But not everything is going great just yet. We still have one audio issue: the audio is choppy. It cuts and get slightly out of sync. We are of course investigating it but this is a more reachable goal and we are maintaining the pressure.
We have one action that will be impacting all of you that are registered for beta testing on Google Home. As we speak, the engineering team is switching everybody from HLS with no audio to MPEG-DASH WITH (choppy) audio. Please continue testing and report any issue.
The current plan is to troubleshoot the audio as much as possible between now and Sunday evening. If we don’t have a nice continuous sound at that point, I will ask the engineering team to cut down the sound and ask Google to continue the validation without the audio.