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Comment by sand500 | Hacker News Reader

We have tried both Meet and Zoom for the ASL class I am taking. Both are fine until the instructor needs to present a powerpoint. Zoom stops showing everyone's video. Not sure if there is a difference between Zoom desktop app and Zoom chrome extension.

For Meet, it is nice that the instructor can present from a tablet but there is no way to hid the presentation video so it is way too small to see everyone signing.

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I am not a huge fan of a lot of Microsoft products, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by the Teams desktop app for video calls. With a decent sized screen, it seems to work pretty well at keeping everyone "present" on the screen, though I haven't experienced using it with people who only speak visually.

With the Zoom desktop app you can click a button on the top right to switch the view. This allows you to see the presentation and the gallery view at the same time (make sure to have a recent app version). With the mouse you can resize the view between presentation and videos if you like to make the videos bigger.

If you have two screens for Zoom you can keep one screen for screen share and see everyone else on the other. I think there might be a way to turn on this dual window approach on a single screen too so you can control how much screen real estate each gets.

Yeah: you can activate a floating gallery panel of video feeds.

Only with the native app. The same one that intentionally bypassed Mac security.

Zoom can show face video if you don't maximize the screen - the participants show up on top. Or use a 2nd monitor. Zoom was the first one to capitalize on 3 monitors - I've used a bidirectional share + participants on the 3rd screen.

Yeah I just exit full-screen mode. Then I can see the screen + anyone with video on and chat.

I don't think it shows everyone at once though? Which is pretty important in an ASL class. I only have the chrome extension which doesn't support popping videos out to separate monitors.

It's a feature of Zoom, meetings can be set up to force presenter control. I'm not sure if there's a way to allow individuals to bypass it, but it is something the meeting-creator can turn off.

Zoom also has an option to show the video in a second window to the shared screen if you enable multi screen mode. (You don't need two screens)

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