Speaker 1: Hey friends, I'm Scott Hanselman, thanks for hanging out with me here on my channel. A lot of us have got non-technical friends who are currently working from home. Suddenly the entire world is working from home. This is being recorded in April of 2020. And as such, I think we've all been on those meetings, the Zoom meetings, Teams, Skype, Google Hangouts, where folks are having challenges with their microphones and their webcams. So I have a Windows machine here, and I'm going to go and talk about some of the things that might be useful for you and your non-technical friend to know about. I'm going to put myself up here in the corner, and let's take a look at a few things. First, if I go and launch, let's say, Zoom, now the things I'm going to talk about will apply really to any webcam software, so Zoom, Skype, etc., etc., but when you're in a piece of software like Zoom, you're going to want to look for settings. It's usually somewhere near your face, so here I've got Zoom, it has my face in the corner, I'll click settings, and I'm going to go for video, and then I'll look at audio in a second. Now, here under video, we can see me on this camera right here. But in fact, I'm also up here, which is kind of weird. That's because my computer has two webcams, okay? This webcam here, I'll just put off in the corner. That's when I'm doing my recording. Windows lets you have as many webcams as you want, and in fact, there's a drop-down list here in Zoom that lets me pick those webcams, all right? Now here, if I try to pick a webcam that's already in use, it's going to say no. It's going to go gray. It's going to get confused. I can pick a camera that's not in use, so to be clear, you can't share webcams. I can't be on both a Skype call and on a Zoom call at the same time with the same webcam. So the first thing you want to do is pick the webcam that you can see yourself in, make sure that it looks the way you want. Sometimes people will have a laptop with two cameras, right? You might have a Microsoft Surface, or you might have an iPad, and you're going to have a... Where's our camera here on my silly little thing? I've got a camera here, my little camouflage Surface. I've got another camera here, and they're called front and back. So you'll need to make sure that you select the camera that you want. Once you've selected that, it'll remember that. The next thing you're going to want to watch for is if you have the bandwidth, select enable HD. Now that's only if you've got really good internet. You're not going to want to do that if you are just having internet of a megabit or two. And a really good way to test to see if you have enough bandwidth to do video is bring up a browser, and then go to, I'm going to move myself over here, go to fast.com. You can have you or your non-technical friend do that. If your bandwidth is around four to five megabits, you can get decent video. Ten or fifteen is ideal. Mine is adequate for the kinds of things that I'm doing. Usually I can get four hundred or more. I wouldn't try doing really good quality video or HD video on anything less than four. Ten gives you enough room. Now here's the other thing to think about when you're doing video, is the family trying to do Netflix at the exact same time. So watch out for that. If you're working from home and you're finding that the internet's going up and down, maybe the kids are in the other room watching Netflix, what you can do is have them pre-download their movies ahead of time, and that'll free up bandwidth, put their iPads into airplane mode, and that'll set you up for success when you actually have to do your work. Additionally, if you do have a technical friend, you could go and search for QOS. So if you have like a Verizon router quality of service, and you can go and say, I want to adjust my router's quality of service, and that's a way of saying, this computer that I work on in my day job is more important than the kid's iPad. And you're basically saying, I want a pipe of a certain size for my video, and I want everyone else in the house to have less. This is a way for you to control the size of your internet pipe, and ensure that your meetings, your Zoom meetings, your Skype meetings, your team meetings, have a good quality. So as a reminder, you need decent speed to be able to do this kind of thing. So you're going to want numbers in the four or higher. Ten is ideal. Looks like some kids are on the internet in the other room perhaps there. You're going to want to pick your camera, and make sure that you can see yourself in Zoom settings. If you can't see yourself in Zoom, or Teams, or Skype settings, then it's not going to be successful. Next thing that's important is your microphone. Now I've got multiple microphones, and you can actually see me here talking. What you can do is tap on the microphone that you think is live. There you go. You see that one is live. Let's see if this microphone is live. Okay, that's not the microphone I'm using, but I can select that microphone. We'll pick the Logitech. Looks like that one is live. Pick the microphone that sounds the best. Have a friend test it out for you, but again, if you can't see that moving, then in fact, no one will be able to hear you. This is an interesting pro tip. On most machines, the microphone and the speaker can be separate. I like to use this microphone, but I also have a speakerphone down here. I've got a speakerphone, and that's my preferred speakerphone, but I don't set the input of my speakerphone as the default because it doesn't sound good. I've tried it before. You can make similar decisions when you're doing this work. I recommend one like this. This is a Logitech over-the-ear set like this. Sounds great. Lightweight. It doesn't give you that sense of claustrophobia that you get if you have two headphones on. These are very inexpensive. That always sounds great. You don't have to have a mic like this, certainly if you don't want one. To review, make sure that you see yourself on the video, that you've selected a camera. Decide whether or not you want to enable HD. Make sure that you know and test. The other thing that's worth pointing out, and I've mentioned this before in other episodes, is lighting. This is me in the dark on a good camera at night. Here it is with the lights turned on. It's just a lot. You can actually see I've got a little bedhead here. Nice lighting is good. Now, you don't have to have fancy lighting like I've decided to have here. You don't have to do that. In fact, if you want, you can just get yourself positioned better. If you put yourself somewhere where you're not backlit, where you're in fact frontlit, you have your kitchen window. You've got anywhere where you can put the light in your face, you're going to be more successful than if the light is behind you. Really, really important. Let's take a look at another online meeting system. We'll look at Google Meet. I'm going to go to meet.google.com, formerly Google Hangouts, I'll say Test Meeting. This is a browser-based one. You'll remember that Zoom did not use the browser. You can see here it says Camera Failed. What's going on there? Well, I can hit this dot, dot, dot, I can hit Settings, go to Video, and I can pick my camera. Now, it failed because I'm using my camera elsewhere. In fact, I'm paused right now, so there's something all messed up. Let's go ahead and pick the Logitech Brio, and then, look, suddenly thing works. That has messed up my camera, but if we go back, things are okay. Again, Windows does not like you to run the two programs that talk to the camera at the same time. Then, while you're in there, you can also set your resolution, the quality of what you're going to receive. If you're having issues with stuttering, you can actually turn down the resolution of the incoming, incoming video, so you can encourage your viewers or the folks in your classroom who are having trouble. They can even go down to just one video at a time. That'll make it really easier on those lower bandwidth, that less than four megabits number. So, I hit Done. I can see myself. If you see yourself before you join the meeting, then you're going to be working. And if you look in the lower left-hand corner there, pop, pop, pop, you can see that it actually sees me and hears me, so that's going to work. If I mute myself, pop, pop, pop, now it doesn't see me. Okay? Then, I can go and join my meeting. You'll get your login information there. And there we go. I've got a good meeting. Again, should have been more camera-ready, but I'm doing okay. Now this one is browser-based, and if you're using a browser like the new Edge or like Chrome, if you look up here in the upper left-hand corner, it's actually got a little red dot. In Edge, you'll see something similar. In something like Chrome, additionally, over here, you're going to see a note that says, this page is accessing your camera. Let's start up a meeting with our camera not allowed. Okay. You're going to get a pop-up here where it's going to try to see your camera, and it's going to see this pop-up that says, Meet.Google wants to use your camera. You have to hit Allow, or it's not going to let you see that. Now it doesn't mean that your camera is going to be used all the time, it's not going to be sneaking around looking at you, but if you're uncomfortable, make sure that you get a cover for your camera. You can get one that looks like this, and then you just go like that if it makes you uncomfortable. Okay. But let's say that you or one of your classmates accidentally pushes Block. Okay. Your camera is blocked. Now I need to go to my settings. Now every browser is a little different, but you're going to go to your browser's settings, search for Camera or search for Privacy, and you'll see here that Google Meet has been blocked. So I need to remove that from the block list and make sure that the cameras that I care about are removed from the block list. Okay. I'm going to then refresh my browser. Now when I go in, I'm going to say Allow, double-check to make sure that I pick a camera that's currently working in case I have multiple cameras, and there we go, I'm back and working. Okay. So hopefully this gives you a general sense of how these things work. Every meeting system is different. They all have a settings. They all have a place for you to pick your video, to pick your audio. If you want to set it up, you can set it up as default. It's my last little tip for you. You go down to the lower corner of Windows. There's usually a speaker down there. You right-click on that, right mouse button, not left-click, and then click Open Sound Settings. This will give you your output device and your input device. Most of you will just have one or two. You might have one that says Real Tech. That might be the audio microphone that is built into your laptop or your desktop. If you have a webcam, it might have your webcam as a microphone. Your output device, it could say Headphones. Make sure that those defaults are set, and when you show up in your meeting, then those defaults will be set and everything should work out great. So hopefully you can give this video to your friends, your neighbors, your teachers, and your teaching professionals, and it might give them a little bit of context and help you out with your tech support. I hope that you have a great meeting and that you all stay safe. Thanks.