Presenting a YouTube video

[drepouille]

I used my G Suite account to broadcast a baptism over Google Meet today. I set up my laptop, USB webcam, and a TV in the font room. I set up another laptop and TV in the cultural hall. I was asked to show YouTube music videos for the opening and closing hymns. So I opened YouTube in a second tab, and clicked Present to broadcast the video.

During testing, with me running between rooms, this worked perfectly. But during the baptism, I had another brother monitor the second laptop in the cultural hall. He texted me that they could hear the music, but could only see the video stream from my webcam, rather than the video from the YouTube tab. I could not explain why he was having that problem.

When I returned home, I did another test, with the laptops side by side. It worked perfectly. After some thought, it occurred to me that either (1) the webcam stream had been "pinned" to his screen, or (2) the sound from my TV was captured by the webcam mic, causing the "spotlight" to shift from the YouTube stream back to the webcam stream.

So the lesson I learned today was that I needed to train my helper better on how to use the Google Meet interface, and to shift the focus to the correct stream during the broadcast.