Recently I found this great option for showing streaming video in a Webex meeting. Basically, as the presenter, you can share a streaming YouTube or Vimeo video, and your attendees can hear the audio from the video you are showing. You can see the great little Cisco video here on how to use it (it’s less than 2 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN3Z96oEvQA
The problem was that nobody in the meeting could hear the audio from my video when I played it.
Lookout #1: Make sure the feature is turned on. In my case, my company’s Webex account is large enough to be administered by IT, so the button was simply not there because the feature was turned off. There a couple administrative settings they may need to set for you (deep within Webex) to get all the video options working properly. I am going to check with IT to see what they had to do so I can comment on it.
But, even after IT found and turned on the settings we needed to get up an running, I still couldn’t find the button. I couldn’t find the Webex setting to play the audio from my computer anywhere! Where did I go wrong?
Before changing the Optimize setting, computer audio option is unavailable.
Once “Optimize for motion and video” is set, the Share your computer audio option is available.
The answer is embarrassingly simple: I missed a setting that they showed in their video clip (alas). I needed to change my share settings from Optimize for text and images to Optimize for motion and video. Once I changed that setting (shown at 0:22 in the video above), the option to hear my computer’s audio became available.
Steps:
- In Webex Meetings, click the Share Content button
- Find the Optimize dropdown list. In some versions of Webex, it may be at the top of the Share content window, and sometimes it’s at the bottom of the screen
- Make sure the Share your computer audio checkbox is selected
Note: Your mute button does not mute your computer’s audio. Your mic can be live during the video, so if you don’t want to be heard, mute yourself!
There is a problem with this. I’m showing videos that display text-heavy PowerPoint slides, so Optimize for text and images is really the setting I needed to make my slides look beautiful in video form. The resulting video showed very pixelated text. The solution for this was to adjust my second monitor’s resolution down to 1280×720 (using my Windows 10 display settings). This improved the readability of the PowerPoint substantially!
Please let me know if comments if this helps or if you have any questions, and good luck!
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hello! Really appreciate you writing this up – it made things a lot clearer. Did you ever get a response from IT on what settings they enabled? I’m trying to ask the team I work with now to do this!
Hi Joe. I have not been able to get an answer from them on what the setting is called, but it definitely is a site setting. Webex updated their article to mention that now, which is good (https://help.webex.com/en-us/ntx2aid/Share-Motion-and-Video-Content-in-Cisco-Webex-Meetings). We switched to Event Center, and unfortunately, I lost the ability to use the feature altogether for now. I do hear that many updates are coming in September involving video in Webex.