Conference in Cloud and online meeting technology

[B. Estrade]

On 5/27/20 6:34 PM, Steven Lembark via yapc wrote:
> 
>> On #yapc, Todd has already mentioned that if you're presenting over
>> Zoom and you're sharing slides from your laptop screen, the refresh
>> rate of those slides is much slower than what you would normally
>> desire.  Hence, you are advised to have fewer transitions among (or
>> within) slides than you would if you were plugging your laptop into a
>> conference-quality data projector.
>>
>> Can other people confirm that that is good advice?  (I suspect this
>> is not limited to Zoom.)
> 
> I haven't seen that at all presenting here at the LUG. Your computer
> seems like a nice platform for testing throughput (e.g., not on fiber,
> not the most modern).
> 
>> Also, slide layout and typography:  What have people found works best
>> over Zoom?  My impression so far is that I can get away with my
>> normal fonts in my slides -- but that if I go share my terminal, the
>> font, font size and background color need to be chosen more carefully
>> than usual.
> 
> So far my usual format (black line across the top, sparse black-on-
> grey below) seems to look decent.
>   
>> What have people learned with respect to sharing your screen, both in
>> slides and in terminal?
> 
> The main issue is that people see you (sort of) or the slides but not
> both. A big part of my keeping people awake is moving around,
> interacting with people in the audience. With Zoom it's my voice
> droning along with the slides. The best way I've found to keep things
> moving is progressive slides, with the content updating 3-5 times
> per slide. If refresh rates are that much of an issue then that may
> prove to be a bad idea...

Recently I've seen people doing nice things using Open Broadcast 
Platform (OBS). Apologies if this has been mentioned. For Zoom it seems 
you need to install some sort of virtual camera plugin for Zoom to 
target, but OBS is really meant to live stream (1984Tube, twitch, etc).

That said I've not been able to get it to work myself on Mac (it might 
have something to do with graphics acceleration, not sure). The examples 
I've seen have been from Ubuntu and when it works, it's very nice and 
create quite an interactive and professional looking environment. This 
includes streaming videos playing on the host, etc. YMMV.

Also for Zoom, like most I've been on some pretty large calls these daze 
and the general advice is that everyone mutes their mic and turns off 
their camera to be thrifty with the explosion of bandwidth.

Brett

>