So, I have bad news. My company decided to go with Livestream Studio, a vMix competitor, over my recommendation. It's a fine system and I've been able to make just about everything work except I'd been hoping to use vMix Call for a longstanding personal project of mine: an interview panel show.

In the past I tried to do this a bit with Skype and it became too complicated with guests not being able to figure it out, connectivity issues, and no mix-minus.

So, my challenge, if you are merciful enough, is to teach me how step-by-step, so I can use an alternative to vMix Call to produce my dream project with 4-5 simultaneous guests in Livestream Studio or a less expensive version of vMix than vMix Pro!

Is there a cloud service that does what vMix Call does? Anyone have links to how to setup with something like Zoom? I really want mix-minus for the guests, so they aren't wearing headphones, but can still hear program audio.

I realize that this will infuriate some of you, but responses to this post should be relevant to pretty much anyone who isn't a vMix Pro user.

Thank you, in advance!

-- B.

In the past I've done this using both vMix and Wirecast. I believe that Livestream Studio is just a branded version of Wirecast.

I used Jitsi Video Bridge as the remote video connection, although others have used Skype as well. JVB is open source, so you can setup your own instance on a private server or VM, and then have control of the video properties.

I used desktop capture to gather the video from the JVB. I used VoiceMeeter Banana to handle the audio mix-minus arrangements.

Took a bit of head scratching to make it work, but it can work. JVB is a selective forwarding unit (SFU.) It sends the video of the current talker.

At the time I did this vMix didn't support the browser input type. That might be an alternative to using desktop capture, on a suitably capable host.

I eventually found that I had to split the JVB client and vMix onto different hosts to split the workload. Then I used NDI desktop capture bring the call into the production.

This is interesting. When you say JVB sends the video of the current talker, does that mean it switches for you? If so, how accurate is the auto-switching?

(BTW, It's not really important, but I'm pretty sure Livestream Studio is not just a branded version of Wirecast. I've tried Wirecast before, as well, and Studio has a very different UI/UX as well as integration with various hardware products and apps from Livestream for remote inputs. It's not at all a bad switcher and I won't complain at all about using it for the big project, but vMix might be an even better product at this point and, well, for my personal interview panel project, vMix is the better product at this point.)

Thanks!

Thanks, but Sinclair's video only addresses how to setup one guest. Do you need separate PCs for more than one guest? How would you go about adding more than one guest?

Thanks so much! :-)

I know a professor who uses Zoom and vMix to teach classes remotely. The University mandated Zoom, since they use it various applications. The combination can work well.

Sorry to come in so late in the conversation.

I've used Zoom.us screen-capture for events with up to 6 participants.

Zoom.us creates multiple video sources, I believe one for each filmstrip thumbnail as well as the selected full-screen mode (active speaker or gallery). The one I use is the full-screen, active speaker view. They are not marked in intelligent ways, so you'll have to look through each source and identify the one you need.

I've conducted video switching both as automatic using audio levels and also by double-clicking my gallery view (the multi-party filmstrip).

I do crop the screen capture to exclude interface elements, so you do NOT get the full 720p signal that Zoom.us maxes out as on the desktop.

Here's one sample of this format: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RJgDyg5Lt4

I hope this is helpful!

Chad