HACKER Q&A
📣 plg

YouTube over Zoom


On Zoom, is there a way for a presenter (e.g. a teacher) to present a YouTube video to participants (e.g. students) without literally having the teacher’s local YouTube stream get sent over zoom? It’s unworkable.

What about a feature whereby a presenter can submit a YouTube url to zoom and then each participant’s machine fetches and presents the YouTube stream locally?

My kid’s teacher keeps showing YouTube videos over zoom and the frame rate is like 1 frame per 2 seconds and it’s totally unworkable.

  👤 aquark Accepted Answer ✓
If the teacher is moderately technical then they can gain a lot of flexibility by using OBS (https://obsproject.com/) and its 'virtual camera' feature as your 'webcam' feeding into Zoom.

Then anything you do in OBS is feed into Zoom as a direct video feed and saves Zoom screen scraping and re-encoding the video. You can use OBS's screen capture or better yet pre-download the files and just play them back.

👤 Minor49er
Watch2Gether (w2g.tv) or SyncTube (sync-tube.de) might be useful, though the best and easiest thing the teacher should do is to drop the URL to the video in the Zoom chat. If possible, it would be a good idea to capture the footage of the playback to show the teacher how it looks since they might not understand how severe the problem is
👤 cowvin
Jitsi can do it, but it's not as popular, unfortunately.