Lesson 8: Giving each person their own feed
You have outputs. Now you need to decide who appears in each one. The Participants tab is a simple routing table that lets you connect people to feeds with a single click, even in a busy meeting.
The routing table
The Participants tab shows a row for every person in the meeting, with their profile picture, if they have one, and their display name. Across the table are columns for your outputs. To send someone to a particular feed, you click the box where their row meets that output’s column. That is the whole idea: rows are people, columns are feeds, and a click connects them.
Finding people quickly
At the top of the page is a search bar. Type part of a name to jump straight to that person, which is invaluable when dozens of people are in the call. Next to the search bar are filter icons that narrow the list, so you can show only the people who match what you are looking for.
The two rules of routing
There are just two rules to remember, and they are sensible ones:
- One person can feed many outputs. The same participant can appear in as many feeds as you like at once.
- One output shows one person at a time. A single feed can only carry one participant, so assigning a new person to a feed replaces whoever was there.
Reading the status
When you route a participant to an output, that person’s Status column fills in with the resolution and frame rate of the video arriving from them. This is a quick health check: good numbers mean a healthy feed, and poor or missing numbers tell you to look at their connection or the bandwidth advice in the performance lesson.
A glimpse ahead. ZoomISO can also do this assignment for you. The Auto Assign feature, set up in Settings, can route people to outputs automatically based on things like their role in the meeting or whether their camera is on, and can remove them again if they no longer qualify. Lesson 12 covers it.
In short
The Participants tab is a grid of people against feeds. Click where a person meets an output to route them there. Search and filters help you find people fast. One person can fill many feeds, but each feed shows only one person. The Status column confirms the feed is healthy.