Ability to launch Zoom meeting from command line

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Due to Covid-19 our community organizes several meetings a week via Zoom where also elderly people participate. Most of them are not used to work with a PC and a mouse. Thus, we have created an autostarter app in C# which starts the related Zoom Id via the web URL https://zoom.us/j/?pwd=. This then starts the standard web browser which then starts the Zoom client.
The disadvantage of this method is, that depending on the standard browsers, from time to time there comes a popup asking if Zoom can be launched. Even there is an option like “Save this choice” this popup comes again after certain days. And many of our elderly peoples are then not able to start the meeting since they just do not know what to do and how to accept this popup.

Describe the solution you’d like
It would be great having a command line option for the Zoom Desktop client where I can start a meeting providing the meeting Id an passcode as parameters without the need to start a web browser. As an alternative a C# package would help providing a method to start a Zoom meeting.

Perhaps a solution already exists but I was not able to find some.

This a solution a found elsewhere and only for Windows.

Zoom meeting, make a direct shortcut on your windows desktop:

  1. Create a shortcut to your zoom. It should be in

%APPDATA%\Zoom\bin\Zoom.exe

  1. Open the shortcut properties and edit the “Target” field.

  2. Go down after the EXE and add (with the quotes)

“–url=zoommtg://zoom.us/join?action=join&confno=<your_conference_number>”

If you have a password with numbers you can make a direct working shortcut.
A password with letters, you have to enter the password after you started the meeting !
(Zoom seems not be able to make a hashed password from letters, until now)

The password entry has to be hashed, so you will need to launch the meeting once and copy it (click the icon on the top left).
The link you copied would look like about this:
https://zoom.us/j/<your_conference_number>?pwd=<hashed_password>

Once you have your hashed password, add after your conference number: &pwd=<hashed_password> (with no spaces)
So like this:

“–url=zoommtg://zoom.us/join?action=join&confno=<your_conference_number>&pwd=<hashed_password>”

(Mind the difference in the link and the shortcut : “?pwd” and “&pwd”)

So the full contents off the shortcut is

%APPDATA%\Zoom\bin\Zoom.exe “–url=zoommtg://zoom.us/join?action=join&confno=<your_conference_number>&pwd=<hashed_password>”

Excellent!
That is exactly the solution, using & instead of ?.
It seems there is somewhere a wrong documentation. But I was not able to find it again.

I remember I read there are also other parameters available, e. g. starting with Video on and use computer sound. Can you give me a hint where to find this documentation? I was also not able to find them.

I found this elsewhere and polished this a little.

I also like to find the full documentation for the Windows app, but this was for me the most important, and I wanted to share this with others.

In case you find the documentation for the Windows app later please inform me.

The problem is that there are many different apps for different platforms and the webzoom and the zoom starting from the browser, too many possibilities.

Kind regards

Stan Bervoets

You can invoke the Zoom client from the command line on a Mac too:

open -a zoom.us 'https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4325619999?pwd=Y3VTRGViM215Ny9aMVJPY0phdummy09'

The URL is the normal link. Unfortunately Zoom comes up with video off, for some reason… :frowning:

I created a shortcut, working well.
However, Zoom also comes up with video off. Does anyone know the solution?
Is there a parameter to insert in the link?

Video on/off on joining a meeting – and audio on/off when joining a meeting – is a setting in the HOST’s account… the joining user probably can’t override this on joining, but can immediately Start Video or Unmute as needed.

You can launch zoom meetings from linux terminal too

zoom --url="<YOUR_MEETING_INVITATION_URL>"
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@FireFisher How to open launch zoom meetings with meeting Id and password without having invitation link in Linux terminal??

Thanks that works!

And I am sure there are a number of other parameters that can be passed via command line, like ‘audio=on’, ‘video=off’, …

where is the list of such parameters?

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Such documentation was formerly available and easily. In recent times though, Zoom have sought to gradually remove such resources (for reasons only they can explain).

For what it’s worth, the most recent reference we can find is available here:-

Zoom URL Schemes (Zoom Developer Blog on medium.com) via Wayback Machine