Saturday, October 22, 2022

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Unlicensed Zoom Room

 At $499 / year / room, this is a pricey option for some nice features.  However, an unlicensed Zoom Room appears to work with some limitations.  From the main website: 

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360000163266-Testing-a-Zoom-Room-setup

You can set up a Zoom Room without a license to test the Zoom Rooms functionality or join meetings. When testing or joining a meeting from an unlicensed room, you will have limited functionality. You will be able to send and receive video and audio. However, you will not be able to invite participants, record, or share content.

Joining a meeting might be possible with a regular Zoom account, and not being able to invite participants from the Zoom Room controls, record, or share content, is it really that important?  

The solution still does not automatically switch among cameras, but that's something the host probably wants to manually control anyway.  

Bottom line: on a budget, this can work well as a starter level solution. 

Hybrid church services over Zoom

This requires the use of Zoom Rooms, and will require some setup, but on a reasonable budget.


from: https://zoom.us/pricing/zoom-rooms ($499/year/room) - for sharing an entire room 

Zoom Rooms: Zoom Rooms is designed to run on hardware and appliances as a dedicated meeting environment for shared spaces (such as conference rooms), and ideal for group collaboration. Zoom Rooms is a dedicated, shared environment for communications and collaboration with a single consistent interface. This means that users know it will always work the same way regardless of which room they walk into, minimizing user error (very important when you think about meeting rooms that are shared among many different employees and their varying technical levels). Users can schedule the room using room booking tools and join their meetings with one tap. Taking Zoom Rooms outside the traditional conference room, Zoom Rooms can be deployed into open spaces as video-enabled interactive whiteboards, and even provide value add services such as digital signage, for corporate communications and branding, and room schedulers, for room booking management.
Zoom Rooms are IT-managed resources that are designed to be the only application up and running on a system. It’s also tied to a calendar resource that’s bookable by others. Zoom Rooms can leverage a variety of display, compute, audio, camera, capture, room control and touch display controller devices to join and manage meetings with integrated HD audio and video. This means that Zoom Rooms audio and video experiences can be easily deployed for phone booths, focus rooms, and huddle rooms, and customized for large boardrooms, broadcast studios, and custom training rooms.
All in all, Zoom Meetings (mobile and desktop client) and Zoom Rooms work together to greater emphasize that they are both a part of one interconnected platform, Zoom.

The video describes merely "joining" a meeting from an unlicensed room. 

The Zoom Room controller is very convenient for switching among several cameras.

Also, after joining a Zoom Room seems to retain HD video resolution (1280x720) rather than dropping the 640x360 when a third party joins a Zoom call.

Details in the video clip. 

Zoom.us and other providers have many informative pages

Zoom and other conferencing services have tutorials and in person seminars on how to best use their service. Sign up at their website and get notified before anyone else. 

They probably have YouTube channels that collect and group video content by topic using playlists. Explore and enjoy!

Hybrid Meeting with Zoom - Setup and Tips for Beginners (on YouTube)

An example of how to set up a hybrid meeting - look for others (google can be your friend):

Fei shows you how to set up a cell phone as a secondary camera -- many cameras built into cell phones are very good and are flexible in adjusting the lighting either automatically or manually. 

Reminder: if you have two devices connected to the same meeting in the same room one of them has to be set to "do not use audio".  Muting the device only shuts off the microphone but not necessarily the speakers, and a disruptive feedback noise is almost guaranteed.  Even experienced hosts run into this error so it is worth repeating.  Any two audio sources in the room can create problems, including using a separate conference room telephone for audio - which can provide great sound, but is a huge problem unless every computer in the room connected to the meeting has selected "disconnect from computer audio", including the host computer.

Lexington Computer and Technology group hybrid meetings

The Lexington Computer and Technology Group have prepared their analysis of hybrid meetings. 


It is specific to their meeting space, Room 237 at the Community Center, and is useful to see a specific configuration and how the designers chose to use the equipment available to them. 

https://wiki.toku.us/doku.php?id=lexingtoncomputergroup is active and has many interesting topics; many events are recorded and available on their website for replay.

Bringing Zoom into WIreCast

Sometimes when in a WireCast (live streaming) scenario it is useful to bring in a remote guest speaker or participant with Zoom or other conferencing software. 


And another description of including Zoom with WireCast live streaming.