Eyeson video meetings are based on the MCU+ Single-Stream Technology that provides many advantages like "everyone sees the same at the same time", it lets you create virtual rooms with its layout and layer features and much more.

But this also means, that you see yourself like all other participants see you. And unfortunately, this is not what you are used to. In other meeting tools your local video is usually shown instantly and mirrored based on the following trick:

There's a new feature that you can use on your custom UI with eyeson-js since v1.8.6.

Picture-in-picture camera is a nice addition to screenshare presentation as it includes the presenter's camera in the screenshare.

What is this about?​

In version 109, Chrome has rolled out a new media-picker where the order of display surfaces has changed. It has changed from screens/windows/tabs to tabs/windows/screens. Furthermore the pre-selection has changed too - from screens to tabs. Lucky for us, since version 107 of Chrome and Chromium based browsers, like Edge and Opera, there's an option that gives you back the control.

This article is showing how it can be controlled in your custom UI with eyeson-js since v1.8.5.

We're introducing Eyeson video meetings in 16:9 HD video format!

How to start​

The default aspect-ratio is still 4:3. In order to activate widescreen mode (aspect-ratio 16:9), you have to start a meeting via API and set the widescreen option to true.

For example using curl:

curl -X POST \
-H "Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY" \
-d "user[name]=John Doe" \
-d "options[widescreen]=true" \
https://api.eyeson.team/rooms

Integrating streams from drones or body-cams into video meetings is a nice-to-have. Since lots of devices of this kind provide their stream via RTMP bridging RTMP to webrtc is the task to solve.

With ghost we provide a go-based webrtc client which connects to an Eyeson meeting as a client and allows to stream in and out of that meeting. This client can be easily combined with a go RTMP server to achieve this.

A much loved feature in video meetings is to blur or replace your background. This feature Virtual Background is part of the Eyeson UI, the options are "blur" and "strong blur", backgrounds provided by Eyeson, or a custom image via API provided by you.

From now on you can include a connection quality indicator in your custom UI. This will give your users a quick feedback about their current audio / video quality.

In its simplest form, you can use it as a traffic-light display for good / ok / bad connection. We also provide some more details and value, like bitrate, jitter, packet loss, and round-trip time.

Any Eyeson video conference will stay open as long as at least one participant is present, and shutdown after a short waiting time when the last user has disconnected. In case your user did miss to disconnect or is gone for some other reason, we strongly suggest to use some sort of inactivity detection and auto-shutdown in your client applications. Using the default web UI we already got you covered: Any participant will be shown a dialog if there is no action detected for a long time.

Inserting a custom media stream into a video meeting, can be difficult. Let's think of showing a video, live data or a stream from a security camera, dronefeed or bodycam.

With Eyeson API and eyeson-js you only need a few lines of code to stream any media directly into a meeting.

Sending the screen capture is usualy only possible when displayed in the presentation view. This means, that only the presentation can be seen, but not the other participants.

With Screen Cam you can share your screen capture stream in a simple way instead of the camera stream. This way you can share your desktop, your browser or a browser tab (depending on the browser the client is using) as part of a meeting.