Display user's local video feed when meeting hasn't started

[AndroidDev (Johann)]

If a participant attempts to join a session that hasn’t yet started (because the host hasn’t yet started it), is it possible to still let the participant see their own local video feed on-screen? I believe that currently if the participant hasn’t joined, they don’t get the local camera feed.

If this is not supported by the SDK, the only workaround that I can see is to create a view that is independent of the Zoom SDK that takes directly displays the camera feed and then discards it once the user joins.

Would be nice though if the SDK could just enable the video stream even when the user has not yet joined the session. This allows them to do things like adjust their appearance, room lighting, or whatever before the session begins. Doing this after the session starts takes away from time that really should be spent on the meeting itself and not fiddling around with settings that can be done in advance. This use to be possible before you updated the SDK forcing participants to wait until the host joined. In the older SDKs, onUserJoin would be called providing them with a ZoomUser that could be used to display their feed.

[jon.zoom (Jon)]

Hi @AndroidDev,

Currently the only way to access a video canvas is through a user object, which requires you to be in a session. We can investigate the possibility of adding a new video preview feature, which I’ll keep you updated on.

In the meantime, a couple of potential workarounds:

• Use the command channel to notify other SDK instances when you are ready to transmit your video. With this approach, you would only render the video of another user in the session after they have joined and sent that command, which could be triggered by the user tapping a button in your UI.

• Manually access the camera feed and render it. This approach would not directly involve the SDK, but would allow you to render video outside of the session. The downside of this approach is that it becomes easier for a different camera to show up upon joining the session and using a ZoomVideoSDKVideoCanvas.

Thanks!