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Ask HN: What features would improve video chat/meeting software

15 points by jrs235 ↗ HN
Two ideas:

1. A numeric overlay/identifier of participants for easily "going around the table" and not missing anyone. Some software moves the participant tiles around and not everyone's order is the same across participants. Perhaps just tracking and displaying the meeting entry number. If I enter the "room" 3rd then "3" gets associated with my tile.

2. The option to automatically turn off my camera if my mic is silent or quiet and only turn it on when my mic picks up [sufficient] sound (like when I'm talking).

19 comments

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cfjgvjh
Prioritize audio data over video. I have issues in zoom when someone has slow connection where the video lags and the audio gets really garbled, making it impossible to communicate. If instead it just killed the video feed based on connection health, I'd at least be able to talk.

I'd also like a user mute button in general as a non-host. Some people have really bad microphone setup despite being year-in into the pandemic and remote stuff.

booboofixer
I'm not sure if this is present in other software. The video conferencing tools i use only allow for one participant sharing their screen at a time, which leads to switching between participants sharing their screens, scheduling when to show what, wasting time in between etc. Maybe its too much to ask of people's internet connections, but two people looking at each other's screens simultaneously should be an option.
andrei_says_
Analysis showing who speaks what percentage of the time - in real time.
jvanveen
Any particular use-case you have in mind?
andrei_says_
Google’s research on team success points to “everyone speaking approximately the same amount of time and being heard” as one of the major factors, along with safety to speak one’s mind and make mistakes.

I’m too many meetings the highest paid person takes the most airtime.

If this balance could be a visible metric that would contribute to more productive meetings.

The metric was mentioned in the second half of this talk.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VzWLGMtXflg

iamevn
push to talk on a global hotkey
toomanyducks
Hm, I know pulse audio has a CLI that allows muting, you could probably hack something up in Bash, maybe with netcat to get messages from a keyboard daemon to the script.
mijkal
There's a utility app on macOS that I've used for years called Shush < https://mizage.com/shush/ > that provides a global mic toggle (double tap to invert toggle to speak/mute).

Very nice because it works at OS level and is same no matter which app I'm using.

hiidrew
Something that I've always thought would be fun is a groupchat that makes text bubbles bigger based on how much that individual has contributed.

This could be extended to meeting software, the more a person talks the bigger their avatar becomes. An easy downside is distraction but it's an interesting concept.

Slightly inspired by a peer of mine during graduate school https://www.riesmurphy.com/eclipse-shortform.

kgran
I wonder if a reversed version of such a feature would be better in some circumstances...
atatatat
Only optimizes for how much noise, not how much signal.
bradknowles
Oh, god. No, please.

Or if this is an option, turn it off by default, please.

And only do it for small chat rooms. I can’t imagine what this might be like with 49+ participants.

toomanyducks
Just working! We don't need more features, we need the ones we have to work well! I have to put a lot of effort into making my computer reliably join meetings with working sound, video, etc.

Yeah, there's a ton of reasons this is hard to do, but you can't tell me that if everyone at Zoom/Microsoft/whatever redirected their efforts to making their existing stack work reliably, there wouldn't be progress.

jvanveen
Sounds good! Fixed tiles make sense. Turning the cam on at certain sound levels should be possible. I am working on a video conferencing ui for the Galene sfu(https://github.com/garage44/pyrite). Does anyone know of a good Javascript/canvas sound visualizer? Pyrite already got one, but I prefer circular visualization that can take more space in audio-only streams.
jvanveen
Option 2 might be interesting in conbination with push-to-talk?
dolores_tyrion
passing down the microphone like in real life, only the person who holds the virtual microphone can speak others are automatically muted, if someone wants to speak , they have to ask for the microphone with a key press, the current speaker or the moderator decides to pass down the microphone, we can increase the number of mic to 2 or 3
aristofun
Just Mute sound (not my mic) button would be enough, thank you
bradknowles
Everyone should be on push-to-talk by default. The meeting organizer/owner of that particular video chat room should have the option of making that mandatory for all participants.

Better handling of audio from multiple simultaneous sources, so that you can mix the audio from multiple speakers, and not just have only one person who can be heard and who talks over everyone else.

The option of a “talking stick” that has to be passed around is also a good one.