Thursday, January 7, 2016

Lifesize Room / Team 220 Video Snapshots

If you have a Lifesize video conference unit, specifically the Lifesize Room 220 or the Lifesize Team 220, then you may know that in the Call Manager tab you can see a video snapshot preview from the camera.  I honestly don't know how often it grabs a frame but it is around every 15 - 30 seconds, whether or not a conference is active.  As an IT administrator this is helpful for maintenance and even troubleshooting!

For maintenance, it is nice to be able to pop into the web interface and just make sure no one is in the room before running up or down stairs.  It's no fun to run up to a meeting room only to find someone using it. I suppose it may help out your FitBit stats but sometimes you don't have time to waste.

For troubleshooting, it is nice to be able to see at least a glimpse of what they see on their screen(s), especially if they are in a different city.  While you don't see the live video stream, you can at least see what's there every 15 or so seconds.

This should be on by default.  If not, the setting is in Preferences -> Video -> Video Control.  Enable "Video Snapshots."  This will then show the little preview and actually even let you save the frame to a JPG.

Also, this seems to be undocumented issue, but this feature does not work if you have recording enabled (Preferences -> Video -> Record and Stream).  I enabled it once while just playing around and it took me months to figure out why I lost the ability to view the video snapshots.  I suppose it does this because in the call manager screen you also have the option to enable or disable Video Snapshots there (see the camera icon below).  However, when recording is enabled they use this screen space for a record button.  Who knew?  Not many, and this is actually the reason for this quick blog post; an undocumented "thingy."


This may also apply to the Lifesize Room 200 and the Lifesize Team 200, I'm not sure as I don't have those older units.  This feature does not exist in the Lifesize Passport units or the newer Lifesize Icon 400 or Icon 600 units.


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Science Fiction Author / Vice President of Technology for The Christman Company