Hangouts Voice Calling Doesn't Work on my PC

On my PC, when I make a video call with Google's Hangouts, I can't
hear the incoming sound. When I make a voice call with Hangouts therer
is no such problem. What is wrong? There is no speaker icon on my
Hangouts on the PC while there is in the version on my Android phone
where video calling works. TIA.

Ricardo Jimenez wrote:

On my PC, when I make a video call with Google's Hangouts, I can't
hear the incoming sound. When I make a voice call with Hangouts
therer is no such problem. What is wrong? There is no speaker icon
on my Hangouts on the PC while there is in the version on my Android
phone where video calling works.

Are you asking about the old Hangouts app that would do just chatting
and you had to install the Hangouts Dialer app which is an ancilliary
app to the Hangouts app to add voice/dialer to the Hangouts app?

Old Hangouts app:

Hangouts app ____ chatting
\__ Hangouts Dialer __ dialer, VOIP calls

Or are you asking about the new Hangouts app that went back to just
chatting, and got renamed to Hangouts Chat, and the Hangouts Meet app
for video conferencing (like Zoom)?

New Hangouts app*s*:

Hangouts Chat app __ chatting
Hangouts Meet app __ video conferencing

The old Hangouts and Hangouts Dialer were retired in October 2019. See:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190804...hut-down-2020/

Those are what happened to the Android apps.

I don't recall there was a Hangouts /program/ (not app) for a Windows
desktop PC. I read the Hangouts Chrome app (you run the web app by
connecting Chrome to their site) got deprecated. They then went to a
Chrome extension (the extension is only usable within Chrome) for
Hangouts; see:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...hacjanaoiihapd

Just *HOW* are you accessing Google's Hangouts service on the Windows
PC? By using Chrome with the extension? By using a web browser and
going to hangouts.google.com? If so, which web browser? By running an
Android emulator (e.g., Bluestacks) on your PC, and installing the
Hangouts app (and which one) into the emulated Android OS?

On smartphones, you should've switched from Hangouts + Hangouts Dialer
to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. On your PC, depends how you are
accessing the Hangouts service. If using a web browser, does it have an
auto-mute function or extension to shut up a site until you choose to
unmute it (to prevent sites from blowing out your speakers and ears by
playing very loud noise when you visit a site)?

For example, in Firefox, I installed the Mute Sites by Default extension
to prevent sites from blaring their noise at me when I visit them. The
result is any site that auto-plays a video when visiting them gets
muted, and a muted speaker icon appears at the right-side of that tab in
Firefox. If I want to hear their noise, I click on the speaker icon to
switch from muted to unmuted. The extension had a whitelist, so I can
exclude some sites, like Youtube, where they won't be muted by default;
however, I also configured Firefox so it does NOT automatically play
videos, and instead a placeholder icon appears over a frame of the video
that I must click to start playing the video. That extension only
auto-mutes a site when it plays a video. Since a voice call is just
audio, there is no video to detect, so no auto-mute of the site.

Ricardo Jimenez wrote:
On my PC, when I make a video call with Google's Hangouts, I can't
hear the incoming sound. When I make a voice call with Hangouts therer
is no such problem. What is wrong? There is no speaker icon on my
Hangouts on the PC while there is in the version on my Android phone
where video calling works. TIA.

Device selection on computers, is one of the "black arts".

You can't expect developers to get this right :-/

https://support.google.com/hangouts/.../5393722?hl=en

If you think it's bad on Windows, you should see the
extensive list of non-existent devices in Linux. Any time
I try to get Audacity configured, I run into this.

*******

For playback, there are supposed to be per-application
controls. On the sound on this computer, there is a
"Master" and a "Wave" adjustment. Whether these correspond
to actual attenuators in the sound chip, I don't know the
answer right off hand. Sometimes, the custom (RealTek)
control panel, makes more of the controls evident.

Whereas Windows makes it look like a "volume control",
without enumerating the details like that.

If you can't hear sound, the problem is one of
two things:

1) Application has selected the HDMI audio, when you
were expecting your "Default" selection of
Realtek analog Lineout to be used. Mine likes to
do that sort of stuff.

2) The channel setup is correct, but the mute button is
asserted. Or, when one speaker is dead and the other
working, that's the Balance control. The Balance
control is typically tiny and hard to read.

HTH,
Paul

New Hangouts app*s*:

Hangouts Chat app __ chatting
Hangouts Meet app __ video conferencing

The old Hangouts and Hangouts Dialer were retired in October 2019. See:

Hangouts video/voice calling and chat are also available on the web at
hangouts.google.com.

kelown wrote:

New Hangouts app*s*:

Hangouts Chat app __ chatting
Hangouts Meet app __ video conferencing

The old Hangouts and Hangouts Dialer were retired in October 2019. See:

Hangouts video/voice calling and chat are also available on the web at
hangouts.google.com.

Already mentioned in my 1st reply for the paragraph starting with "Just
*HOW* are you accessing Google's Hangouts service ...". We don't know
how the OP is accessing the Hangouts service until he replies.

On Tue, 31 Mar 2020 05:29:19 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

kelown wrote:

New Hangouts app*s*:

Hangouts Chat app __ chatting
Hangouts Meet app __ video conferencing

The old Hangouts and Hangouts Dialer were retired in October 2019. See:

Hangouts video/voice calling and chat are also available on the web at
hangouts.google.com.

Already mentioned in my 1st reply for the paragraph starting with "Just
*HOW* are you accessing Google's Hangouts service ...". We don't know
how the OP is accessing the Hangouts service until he replies.

I have been trying several different ways: google icon (with and
without ") on Chrome. Google icon on Firefox. hangouts.google.com
accessed on both Chrome and Firefox. Also I have tried several
combinations of hardware on both sides of the connection: phone to
phone (always works), MAC to PC (always works on hangouts.google.com),
phone to PC (works sometimes). I have made some of the suggestions
he https://support.google.com/hangouts/...14613381?hl=en

As you can see from that thread that a lot of people have been having
similar problems and Google is certainly at fault. As mentioned on
the thread, there are no such problems with Web meetings on Zoom and
Webex.

Ricardo Jimenez wrote:

google icon (with and without ") on Chrome.

Not sure what that means. Is it a toolbar button added by an extension
you installed into Chrome, like Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet? There
is no built-in support for Hangouts Chat/Meet in the Google Chrome web
browser, so no button it would present for Hangouts.

Or do you mean you loaded Google Chrome, logged into your Google account
(often by logging into Gmail), and used the 9-dot grid button in their
web page to present a list of Google services, and scrolled down to pick
Hangouts? If so, that's just a shortcut to hangouts.google.com. You
might allow Google Chrome to retain cookies, DOM Storage, and other
locally cached data between web browser sessions which means you don't
have to login into your Google account when you next load Chrome.
However, there is no button in Chrome to access the Hangouts service.
You could install an extension, or you're using some object/element in a
web document from visiting a Google site.

Google icon on Firefox.

That web browser also has no inbuilt Google Hangouts support, so you
cannot customize its toolbar to include a button for Hangouts. You
installed an add-on into Firefox (although there is no Hangouts app, old
or new, by Google for Firefox), or you are clicking on elements in the
web page you get when visiting them.

hangouts.google.com accessed on both Chrome and Firefox.

Okay, so that one's clear. You used a web browser to visit the Hangouts
web site, and then clicked on some element within that web page, like a
button object in the HTML for the web document.

Also I have tried several combinations of hardware on both sides of
the connection: phone to phone (always works),

No web browser involved. The Hangouts app(s) on your smartphone work.

MAC to PC (always works on hangouts.google.com),

So, Safari (on your Mac) worked from the Hangouts web site to connect to
"something" on your PC.

phone to PC (works sometimes).

And "PC" means what? That you're running a web browser to accept the
call on your PC? What is running on your PC to accept calls?

The problem appears to focus around your use of a web browser and using
the elements within the HTML of a web page.

- Have you tried loading the web browser in its safe mode (which
disables all the extensions you installed into the web browser),
including any extensions that alter the web document they sent to you
(e.g., adblockers)?

- In Firefox, you can do a reset which starts you with a clean profile
in Firefox (no extensions, no after-installtime tweaks). Reset creates
a new profile for the web browser. In Google Chrome, you have add a new
profile yourself: click on the profile toolbar button, click Add A
Person. I don't use profiles in Chrome. My guess after creating more
than 1 profile, you can configure which one gets loaded, by default,
when you load Chrome. In both Firefox and Chrome, and if a new profile
did not help resolve the problem, you can still go back to your old
profile. If the new profile fixed the problem, you could go forward
with the new profile (and be very careful thereafter what extensions you
install again or what tweaks you do in the web browser), or you can go
back to the old profile, and try to fix the problem there, like
disabling all extensions, and reenabling them one at a time and reload
the web browser to retest.

Note: In Firefox, you can configure it to purge all its locally cached
data upon exit. Chrome has no such option, but you can get an
extension to do that for you (e.g., Click&Clean). That would
eliminate old cookies not in a format currently expected. Cookies
have a structure to each record in the .txt file that, when the data
is read and sent to the server, the server expects to be in a certain
format. I've seen where a site changed the structure of their
cookies, but users had problems because the old cookies were still
getting reused but not in the new format. You had to purge the old
cookie to get a new one built. You might want to purge all the web
browser's locally cached data, unload it, and reload it to start
without all that old data. You'd expect a site that changed its
formatting requirements to expire all cookies to create new ones, but
it doesn't always happen. Left hand doesn't know what the right hand
is doing (i.e., there are usually more than one programmer working on
coding a web site).

- Have you tried booting your PC into Windows' safe mode (with
networking) to eliminate contention with any startup programs you
installed?