Re: [Tools-discuss] Live coding with Meetecho

[Lorenzo Miniero <[e-mail]>]

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).

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.

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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> >> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss  
> > 
> > ___________________________________________________________
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> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tools-discuss  
> 



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