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Comment by ElijahLynn | Hacker News Reader

I proposed Zoom vs Jitsi Meet the other day for a virtual hangout with a group of friends. They initially wanted to try Zoom... because of the virtual backgrounds. Yup, that is what they wanted.

I shall suggest Jitsi Meet again soon ;).

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It isn't just a gimmick, it is a legit feature when working from home and you don't want everyone to see your messy kitchen or bedroom. Sadly the chrome app version you have to use for ChromeOS doesn't support that feature anyway :(

Confirming that it isn’t a gimmick. I have been working on distributed WFH Teams for the past 5 years now (long before COVID19) and this has been a consistent point of embarrassment and/or trouble with video conferencing. I can’t begin to tell you how many times we have had people that need extra time to prepare for a meeting because of the background. As a manager, I have had lots of personal conversations with employees who legitimately stress out about getting the computer into a place with a good background.

Zoom and GoToMeeting offer the option for for these backgrounds without needing to do a green screen or anything. Yes, the backgrounds are insanely silly. Like a stock photo of a beach, outer space, a meadow, etc.. I don’t know why one of these companies isn’t smart enough to just put a picture of an empty room as one of the backgrounds. Yes you can tell that the user is using a background still, and it occasionally clips the background wrong for a few seconds, especially during sudden subject movement, but it does largely protect employee’s embarrassment which is a legitimate reason to offer it.

The absolute best implimentation of this background thing is Microsoft Teams’ video chat platform. It does a “blur” background that actually looks pretty good. It is an extreme blur that makes it almost impossible to tell what is in the background, but it looks sort of like a high end camera with low depth of field. Obviously it isn’t going to fool anyone into actually thinking it is real, but it is the least-distracting and most appealing option I have seen yet. Kudos to Microsoft for that one.

Here is what the Microsoft Teams one looks like: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/blur-your-backgroun...

(I have no dog in this fight, just sharing experience. I don’t work for Microsoft. Use whatever you guys want. I am just offering my 5 years of experience fighting with employees about video conferencing. I have heard all the problems with it, but the embarrassment of their background is always the biggest and most common one. Other common ones include wardrobe malfunctions (from employees getting dressed really quickly before a meeting), Significant others saying or doing embarrassing things on camera unknowingly, employees saying embarrassing things while thinking they are on mute, and so on. But the most common complaint is the stupid backgrounds.

That blur looks great. Too bad I have literally never been able to successfully join a Teams call. Every single time we have to fall back to telephone.

That is odd. A large school I work with in the UK rolled out Teams as an emery year measure yesterday. Everyone was happily doing group video chats, no problem.

I think it works fine for people who have accounts set up. But if you get invited to a Teams (or Skype for Business) meeting, you are often required to log in with an account. This is very different from Zoom, which you can participate in without an account.

I have also been sent in infinite loops of download installer, install, now go download installer again.

I installed jitsi yesterday, it now has a „blur background“ option that is in beta and works okayish.

>cheesy virtual backgrounds or blur real background

Seems like a stock slightly blurred image of a wall or bookshelf would be best option

The problem I have with the stock backgrounds is they impart a non-professional feel to the meeting....do i really want to show I’m mentally ‘sitting on the beach’ or ‘out in space’ while talking about who gets downsized?

Zoom refuses to allow virtual backgrounds without green screens, on non-Intel CPUs. I have a laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 3700U CPU supporting AVX2 I think, but Zoom won't allow me to turn that feature on. I mentioned this in a chat room and people speculated Zoom was paid off by Intel.

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/210707503

FWIW Jitsi Meet just added "Blur my background" as a Beta feature. It works decently.

It eats tons and tons of cpu though

Zoom requires a quad core processor for the virtual backgrounds, so I’m not sure it is any worse?

I don’t really like Zoom, but I was on a call the other day with 3 other people calling from phones and iPads, all using virtual backgrounds. You don’t need beefy specs to use the feature.

Probably the other poster meant it requires a lot of CPU for you to have a virtual background, not for other people.

It wouldn't make sense for other people using the feature to take any more processing power--I assume the video is encoded and processed the same either way.

I think the OP meant that people using iPad and iPhone to call in also had virtual backgrounds, so concluded that it might not need as much CPU as the GP surmised.

Another poster mentioned though that Zoom required green screens for this feature on non-intel CPU machines.

I use Xsplit VCam in hangouts. There are a couple of other programs that do the same.

I used this the other day in the free version. The text over the screen was annoying, and the background effect was rather glitchy, but it was effective at hiding the mess I was too lazy to clean up.

However, as we were using it for work conference, I felt like I was adding some goofiness to the call and didn't like that. I ended up moving the camera to show less mess, and then eventually actually cleaned up my mess.

Plus, VCam only works in Windows.

I use it for a bunch of goofy stuff in meetings to lighten the mood. When I want to be serious, I change the background image to a photo of our office. If you combine it with OBS studio, you can overlay yourself on presentations or videos, which is also very useful.

Honestly the backgrounds are goofy and non-essential, but it's been a huge positive icebreaker for the adjustment to all online meetings.

Yup, just a resource drain

I'd be far more willing to turn the video on in my calls of people weren't going to see the messy room in the background, and the calls I'm in have an awful lot of blank screens that would be better if people turned on there video for some face-to-face communication. I think it's less non-essential than you might imagine, this is a really well thought-out feature, and probably pretty technically challenging to implement too.

We moved from GTM to Zoom. One thing I like/miss from GTM is the camera options: "Everyone / Who's Talking / Active Cameras / No-one".

I just looked up virtual background and that is insanely cool and I totally get where your friends are coming from. I've got to give that a shot sometime - the kinds of features people can build are just so cool

We have a slack channel dedicated to screenhots of these backgrounds, It's a lot of fun. :)

I mean .. the ensuing hilarity from uploading funny background images doesn't get old

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