Attending Sessions
With Meetecho you can either simply attend a session, or present remotely. Since the interface changes slightly according to the mode, the two modes are presented in different sections.
This page describes the former, that is how you can join a session as a regular attendee. This means you'll be able to watch everything that happens and interact in the Jabber room, but NOT inject your own audio/video in the room as well. If you're interested in presenting remotely or participating in the virtual queue experiment, visit the related documentation pages.
Joining a WG session as an attendee
You can attend all IETF meeting sessions just using any WebRTC-compliant web browser (Chrome, Firefox or Opera), so you just need to follow the link related to the Working Group session from the agenda in the homepage of this website.
This will lead you to a virtual blue sheet page: just insert your full name and affiliation as you would do when signing the WG blue sheets locally and you'll be ready to go. Notice that you'll also have to clarify you read the Note Well. Once done, press Enter and you'll join the session.
In case you don't have a WebRTC compliant browser, or can't make use one for any reason, you can make use of a more barebone Webinar Mode interface, which will simply provide you with the audio feed from the room and a view of the current slide. You can access it using the link at the bottom of the page.
Familiarising with the Meetecho interface
Once you've signed the virtual blue sheets, you'll be added to the Meetecho room associated to the Working Group session as an attendee. From there, you'll have several different media available:
- the jabber room associated with the WG;
- a view of the slides currently projected on the beamer in the physical room;
- a video feed from the room itself, capturing chairs, current speaker and/or mic lines.
You can use the chatroom to interact with the other participants. Since the Meetecho interface embeds the Jabber room associated with the WG session, you will be able to interact with attendees using regular Jabber clients as well. If you want to start a private conversation with one of the participants, click on the Participants button above the chatroom and double click on the name of the person you want to talk to.
As to the video feeds, nothing is needed on your side. The feeds will automatically show you the current slide being projected and one or more video feeds coming from the room. In case more video feeds become available, more of them will appear in the related area. Please notice that, in case your browser is configured with a 4:3 aspect ratio, the speaker feeds will appear above the slides rather than on their right.
Customising your Meetecho experience
Just signing in, watching the feeds and interacting on the Jabber room is usually more than enough for most of the remote attendees. If you're interested in more control, though, you can customise a bit your Meetecho experience, using the toolbar of functionality in the upper right part of the screen:
The red icon just means the session is being recorded, which is normal: all Meetecho sessions are recorded, so that they can be replayed later on as part of the IETF proceedings.
As to the other icons, they allow you to change the current layout/perspective of Meetecho, allowing you to choose one specific aspect to focus on rather that watching all feeds altogether. As to the top icons:
This icon allows you to enlarge the slides so that they cover the Jabber room as well. The chat messages will still appear as a small overlay that automatically disappears after a few seconds. To enlarge/restore speaker videos, instead, just double click on them.
This icon gives you a quick tour of the Meetecho interface, guiding you through all the available features in an interactive way.
This icon will allow you to leave the room.
The bottom icons, instead, allow you to choose a specific feed to display:
Show the slides at the center, and the video feeds on the right. This is the default perspective and where you'll probably want to stay most of the time.
Show the available audio feeds, in particular with respect to the available alternatives in case WebRTC audio is not working for you (RTSP, HTML5, RTMP).
Show the Etherpad shared editing session. This is only available in case an Etherpad session has been configured and enabled in the room.
Only show the video feeds, hiding the slides. This is particularly useful when the content of the slides is not very relevant and you're more interested in the speakers.