Re: [Tools-discuss] Live coding with Meetecho

[Marc Petit-Huguenin <[e-mail]>]

Hi Lorenzo,

On 3/19/24 6:44 PM, Lorenzo Miniero wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Mar 2024 18:15:48 -0700
> Marc Petit-Huguenin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> On 3/18/24 5:38 PM, Meetecho IETF support wrote:
>>> Hi Marc,
>>>
>>> can you please elaborate a bit on the scenario? How is it different
>>> from screen sharing (which of course is doable with Meetecho)?  
>>
>> In my case, the live coding is done on a separate computer (for
>> security reasons, the computer holding my IP has no camera or
>> microphone connected).  That computer HDMI output feeds into a
>> machine running OBS, which itself has an HDMI output that feeds into
>> the machine that is running all my video clients (Zoom, Webex,
>> Meetecho...) through an HDMI adapter.  That means that the live code
>> is accessible only through this HDMI connection, so I can control
>> precisely what I share publicly.  I remember doing a test with
>> Meetecho at some point exchanging my camera with that HDMI source,
>> but the result was not great because of the reason explained below.
>> Zoom (and apparently WebEx now) have this great feature where it is
>> possible to share a second camera, which is exactly what I use when
>> doing demos of my stuff (the OBS machine is also connected to a
>> document camera, a whiteboard camera, and a mobile camera, all which
>> expand the possibilities when doing a demo remotely).
>>
> 
> 
> Hi Marc,
> 
> if this HDMI adapter shows up as a video capture device (or you use OBS
> to expose a virtual camera), it should indeed show up as an alternative
> way to share your webcam when listing capture devices in the preflight.
> But you're right that this would prevent you from sharing your normal
> webcam at the same time, since we currently only expose ways to share a
> single webcam stream at a time.
> 
> A simple approach may be using OBS for the job: you configure a scene
> where the background is your HDMI capture, and you add your webcam as a
> picture-in-picture on top of that, so that both appear in the video
> that is exposed via the OBS virtual camera (and shared in Meetecho).

Right, and my system already has a switch that permits to move the camera between the machine running Meetecho and the machine running OBS, for this purpose.  The issue is still that when displaying the camera view, there is no guarantee that people will see it with the right aspect ratio.  Before subscribing to Zoom, I even had my OBS machine configured to display a test pattern image that I used to help the viewers adjust the size of the window until it displays each corner of the test pattern. 

> 
> That said, I believe there's a different approach you could try that
> might be better. You could open the captured HDMI stream in a viewer
> (which could be OBS itself or something else) in a way that displays the
> content full screen (maybe on a second screen, or, as I sometimes do, a
> virtual second screen using a null-HDMI dongle) and then from Meetecho
> use the screensharing functionality to share it with the other
> participants. This way, you'd be able to share both webcam and live
> coding as separate streams. This would also have the advantage of
> having the live coding video stream being automatically recognized as a
> screen, which would render it properly in recordings too.

That's an intriguing possibility -- I did not know about null-HDMI dongle.  I'll experiment with that.

Thank you.

> 
> Lorenzo
> 
> 
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Alex
>>>
>>> Il 18/03/24 16:15, Marc Petit-Huguenin ha scritto:  
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> I read the Meetecho documentation, but it seems that there is no
>>>> possibility of using it for live coding -- which is basically
>>>> having the video coming from a participant set to a fixed size, so
>>>> the live coding window is always completely visible to all
>>>> participants.  Here I am assuming that the live coder has a way to
>>>> set up a virtual camera that Meetecho can use.
>>>>
>>>> Did I miss something?  If not, is there a plan to get that one
>>>> day?  Meanwhile, any other solution to live code?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks.
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
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>>
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Marc Petit-Huguenin
Email: [e-mail]
Blog: https://marc.petit-huguenin.org
Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petithug