How to hide own camera stream preview

[Harshit Laddha]

Hi, 

I have a bigbluebutton 2.0-RC4 setup which I will upgrade to RC5 by this weekend. 

The problem that we are facing now in the HTML5 version is when two people join the room with cameras the whiteboard presentation area is cropped in almost half of screen and the cameras are placed horizontally above the presentation area which makes it difficult for some people to see the presentation board clearly. 

I think this can be resolved by just hiding user's own camera preview (because for one camera layout the preview is at the bottom right corner of the screen so it doesn't block or shrink the presentation area) 

So, if hiding own cameras preview is not possible can you refer me to some pull requests / other commits which I can refer to change the camera preview position 

Otherwise, is there any option to make the presentation area full screen in desktop browsers ?

[Chad Pilkey]

You probably don't want to hide the preview completely because it shows to the user that they are sharing their webcam. If you hide the preview they will likely end up leaving it on or not know whether the video is even working or not.

I found two pull requests related to the video dock in the HTML5 client, https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/pull/5117 and https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/pull/5162. They don't tell the whole picture, but they should point you to the right files. My suspicion is that changing the video dock logic will be difficult. I think ultimately it would be better to have a smarter video dock that was attached to the either the top or side depending on which has more space available, but we've taken the simple path of always being on the top for now.

[Harshit Laddha]

Thanks for the prompt reply. I will have a look at both the pull requests. 

I saw this https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/pull/6010 which implements zoom functionality for the presentation area. 
I see that this has been moved to In Review stage so do you have any info on its proposed release date. 

A couple of other questions I had were - 

Fullscreen button is visible in mobile browsers but is not present in the desktop view and implementing the full screen button for the browser should not be too difficult as functionality is already available and exposed by the most of the modern web browsers so can you point me to any relevant PRs for this or if you can direct me to which files need to be changed to enable the "fullscreen button in desktop views too" It would be great. 

Also, is it possible to auto close chat sidebar based on activity in it ? 

[Chad Pilkey]

The zoom functionality is targeted for the release after 2.0 so it won't be in public packages for a few months at least.

The problem with full screen is that it's actually very hard to get right and we weren't really using it as it was intended to be used. The normal usage is something like a video player that needs to send a portion of the page full screen so you can see it full size. What we want is to just send the whole page full screen and we run into conflict with the browser's built-in support for full screen. On desktop you can press F11 or open the browser's menu and go full screen from there. You also can't fully track the native implementation from within your page so your UI gets out of sync with the actual browser state and it ends up looking wrong. We decided to just let people on desktops control their own state the same way as they would on any other webpage.

[ReimarBauer]

Hi there

some users described to become unfocused in this publication because of seeing a mirror of themselves. 

https://publikationen.dguv.de/forschung/iag/praxishilfe/4428/praxishilfe-zoom-fatigue

Since we have layouts now, can we get one for users not to look at their own video stream?

Reimar