Hi all! This is the second part of a series of articles from the IT team of the hotel booking service. on the organization of online broadcasting of corporate presentations and events in one single room.
Π we talked about how we solved the problem of poor broadcast sound using a mixing console and a wireless microphone system.
And everything seemed to be going well, but after a while a new task arrived in our department - let's make our broadcasts more interactive! All our TOR was in one sentence - it was necessary to give remote employees the opportunity to connect to team meetings, that is, not only watch, but also actively participate: show a presentation, ask questions in real time, etc. After analyzing the situation, we decided to use Zoom conferencing.
A small digression: Zoom for video conferencing has been integrated into our infrastructure for a long time. Many of our employees use it every day for remote interviews, meetings and briefings. Most of our meeting rooms are Zoom Rooms equipped with large TVs and 360-degree microphones. By the way, we tried to install these microphones in our βspecialβ meeting room, but due to the large size of the room, they only produced a mess of sounds, and it was very difficult to make out what the speakers were saying. In small rooms, such microphones work perfectly.
Let's return to our task. It would seem that the solution is simple:
- We remove the HDMI cable for wired connection;
- We set up Zoom Rooms in the meeting room so that employees can connect to the meeting and show a presentation from any device from anywhere;
- We remove the camera from our scheme, because why do we need to capture a picture from a camera when we can capture a picture from Zoom? We connect the projector to the laptop via a video capture card, transfer the host to the same place, reconfigure Xsplit to capture the window with the program (Smart Selection function) and go on test broadcast.
- We set up the sound so that the remote guys can be heard and at the same time the sound on YouTube does not suffer.
This is exactly what we did: we connected microphones to the Intel NUC with Zoom Rooms installed on it (hereinafter referred to as the βhostβ), removed the HDMI cable for the projector, taught employees how to βshare a picture in Zoomβ and put it on air. To make it clearer, below is a connection diagram.
We were prepared for the fact that the search for the ideal solution would be thorny, and, unfortunately, this scheme did not work - everything did not go at all as we expected. As a result, we encountered new problems with sound, or rather, its complete absence in the broadcast. It was assumed that the video capture card connected to the room hub via HDMI would transmit audio to Xsplit, but it would not be so. There was no sound. At all.
This rather puzzled us, after which we tested various connection options for another month with varying success, but first things first.
Speaker + microphone
The first thing we tried was to place a speaker under the projection canvas, which was supposed to broadcast the voices of remote speakers, connect it to our remote control and put a microphone in front of it, which would capture the sound from this speaker. It looked like this:
We tested this solution in one meeting, the participants of which mostly connected to the meeting room remotely. Surprisingly, the result was very good. We decided to leave such a scheme for a while, since we did not have a better solution at that time. Let it look very strange - the main thing is that it worked!
Moving Zoom Rooms
βBut what if you run Zoom Rooms on a laptop with Xsplit installed and put both programs on different virtual tables?β We once thought. It sounds like an ideal solution to achieve the goal and at the same time reduce the number of nodes that are needed to conduct the broadcast (and which can potentially fall off). I recall the proverb about the mountain and Magomed:
Video capture took place through virtual desktops. Xsplit is open on one virtual table, a host with a working conference is on the other. If earlier we broadcast the entire screen, now we have taken the opportunity to capture the running process. At the same time, the mixing console was connected to a laptop, so it was no longer necessary to point the microphone at the speaker. Xsplit also captured the voices of remote employees participating in a conference via the Zoom app.
In fact, this option turned out to be the most successful.
The first question that worried us the most was whether there would be a conflict in the transfer of the audio stream between applications. As it turned out - no. Tests have shown that everything works great! We had equally good audio on both Zoom and YouTube! The picture made me happy too. Any presentation was displayed in YouTube, as it is, in 1080p quality. For understanding, I will give one more scheme - in the course of coming up with various solutions, few people understood what kind of animal we were getting, so we tried to fix everything and make as many illustrations as possible:
Encouraged by this success, we held our first meeting with this wiring diagram on the same day. And everything seemed to be going well, but a problem emerged, the source of which we did not immediately establish. For unknown reasons, the webcams of the speakers were not displayed on the projector screen, but only the content being shown. Unfortunately, the internal customer did not like this very much, and we began to dig deeper. It turned out that everything was connected with the fact that in fact we had two screens (a projector and a laptop display), and in the Zoom Rooms settings there is a hard link to the number of displays. As a result, the participants' webcams were shown on the laptop display, that is, on the virtual desktop where Zoom Rooms was running, so we did not see them. There is no way to change this, so we were forced to abandon this decision. This is a fiasco.
Down with video capture!
On the same day, we decided to try to abandon the video capture card (and finally did it for good), and set the projector to Screen Repeat mode so that the host detects only one screen, as we wanted. When everything was set up, a new test broadcast went on ...
Everything worked as it should. All participants of the conference were visible on the projector (we tested it with four people), the sound was excellent, the picture was good. "This is victory!" - we thought, but reality, as always, beats on the sly. Our fresh laptop with an 7th generation Core-i16, discrete graphics card, and 30 gigabytes of RAM began to choke after 100 minutes of test air. The processor simply could not cope with the load, worked at XNUMX% and as a result overheated. So we encountered processor throttling, which eventually resulted in a scattering of picture and sound. The presentation on the projector screen, on YouTube, turned into a hodgepodge of pixels, and there was absolutely nothing left of the sound, it was impossible to make out. So our first victory became another fiasco. Then we were already thinking about whether we should build a full-fledged streamer desktop or get by with what we have.
New breath
We thought that assembling a desktop is not a solution we would like to use: it is expensive, takes up a lot of space (you need to keep a full-fledged desktop instead of a compact nightstand), and in the event of a power outage, we lose everything. But by then, our ideas about how to make everything work in tandem were almost dry. And then we decided to return to the previous solution and refine it. Instead of transferring the host, we decided to try to make a full-fledged conference participant out of the laptop with our own microphones and account. Again, an illustration was made to understand what we have in general.
I must say right away that this solution turned out to be exactly what we needed.
The host worked on the NUC and loaded only it, and the laptop with the client loaded only Xsplit (past experiments showed that it pulls it perfectly). In this solution, Zoom Rooms has the following advantages over a conventional wired connection:
- Displaying content on the canvas through Zoom Rooms is conveniently controlled using the host's tablet. Starting, ending, managing a conference or meeting is much more convenient from the tablet screen than performing some sequence of actions to take control of the meeting.
- To connect to the room, we always have one link - this is the Meeting ID, by which all participants connect, it does not need to be sent to each person personally, since broadcast announcements in the corporate messenger always contain this link.
- Having one premium Zoom account for a room host is many times more profitable than handing it out personally to each office employee who will use the video conferencing system.
- Since the host and the laptop required for broadcasting are no longer connected to each other, we can say that we have a fault-tolerant system: if one device is disconnected, we can restore the broadcast without stopping the conference. For example, if a laptop with a broadcast falls, then using a tablet, we start recording a meeting in the cloud; if the NUC crashes, then neither the conference nor the broadcast ends, just switch the projector from the NUC to a laptop connected to Zoom and continue viewing.
- Guests often come to the office with their devices and presentations. In this solution, we managed to avoid the eternal problems with connecting to the screen via cable - the guest just needs to follow our link and he automatically becomes a meeting participant. At the same time, he does not need to download the application, everything works fine through the browser.
In addition, it is very convenient for us to manage the picture in YouTube itself, since we can change its size, transfer focus from content to webcam, etc. This option turned out to be ideal for us, and it is what we end up using to this day.
Conclusion
Maybe we sucked the problem out of our finger and the right solution lay on the surface or still lies, but we still donβt see it, but what we have today is the foundation that we want to develop further. It is possible that someday we will abandon Zoom in favor of a more convenient and high-quality solution, but this will not be today. Today we are happy that our solution works and all employees have switched to Zoom. It was a very interesting experience that we wanted to share, and we will be glad to know how our colleagues in the workshop solved similar problems using other tools - write in the comments!
Source: habr.com