Introducing: Presenter Mode
NOTE: As for 2023 this feature has been replaced by the ability to share camera and screen video simultaneously and has thus been removed.
Jitsi Meet has had the ability to share your screen with others for years now. Thanks to WebRTC it’s really effortless for applications to allow users to share a window, full-screen or browser tab.
When it comes to the user experience, we decided to replace the user’s video with the shared sreen, and this has been the case ever since Jitsi Meet has supported screen-sharing. Many users would like to share their screen in addition to sharing their video. This can be really helpful during a presentation, since attendees can also see the presenter and their body language thoughout the presentation.
We heard you. It took us a while but here we are, introducing Presenter Mode: simultaneous sccreen and camera sharing is now available on Jitsi Meet.
As you can see, we position a camera thumbnail on the lower right corner of the screen, where the presenter is displayed. You can enable this by “unmutting” your video while sharing your screen.
“But tell us about the implementation!” Ok ok, here we go. There are a number of ways this feature can be implemented. We decided to do it by composing the video on the sender side (preparing the layout on a canvas and creating a MediaStream out of it). This vastly simplifies the implementation on all layers since it’s “just a video stream”. Now that we have it inplace, we have plans to make it even better with a couple of more features, stay tuned!
We hope you like this! Try it out today at meet.jit.si