Not Ready To Replace Zoom
So I need to give an update after digging around and really playing with the softward for a few hours. I will post Additional Comments next to each point below
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I Bought Tier 3 and while this holds some promise, there is no way I can take this live yet. I'll hold on for 59 Days with hopefulness and I hope you can work out some of these kinks:
1. Video Preview Can't Be Mirrored.
there are many Virtual Camera Broadcasting suites (OBS, eCam Live, XSplit and others) that can be used to set up a series of “Scenes” and then send them into the meeting via virtual cam. I happen to use XSplit Broadcaster. Every scene I pushed into the meeting was viewed correctly on my participants screen (and on my tablet under a different name as one of the participants) but for me, in the meeting, everything was backwards (Not Mirrored)
I use countdown timers, scrolling text and lower thirds and its simply unusable when everything appears on my screen backwards.
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OK, it can be mirrored. There is video thumbnail in right hand upper corner of the app window and if you right click it, you get an option to "Flip" and this will flip for you the host but not change the output to the participants. Not intuitive, but it's there.
2. Recording Only To DropBox Offered
I don’t have a drop box account but OK, I suppose I could get one for purposes of facilitating recordings here, so I did, and when I clicked the record to dropbox button it was completely unresponsive, hence I couldnt record at all. The feature set says, recording to Meet Hour is possible but I couldn’t find a way. How about enabling local recording? I do live broadcast everyday, record and upload to Rumble. This is critical for me and others.
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Again found the way to do this. Go into your dashboard. Under recordings you'll see recording settings. It now shows up as an option "Meet Hour Recordings"
3. I use a lot of Video Clips in my meetings. I stage those clips in a playlist (Scene) that I send to the meeting through the Virtual Cam, in this case, XSplit Broadcaster.
My sound gets carried through a Rodecaster Pro 2. I have mics and USB Audio on separate channels. The Meeting keeps telling me that my audio is “Noisy” so far, the ONLY confencing platform that has been able to carry the audio played off the desktop has been Zoom (Original Sound Four Musicians) and minimal noise reduction.
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Have been playing with this all afternoon and cannot get clean audio output of any videos pushed through my interface. The only external audio that seems to be clean is screen Share audio. If I'm playing audio from my broadcast software (OBS, XSplit, etc) Meet Hour treats it as noise and supresses it. This is unworkable in my workflow.
4. I tested the meeting Link with a few colleagues and eventhough Meeting Hour is marketed as not requiring a download of the app, none of them were able to access the meeting without downloading either the Desktop client or the Android App.
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There are overrides on the dashboard / meeting configuration settings to turn off mandatory app download. Participnts can join without download
5. Every time a participant went to join my meeting (same meeting) they needed to launch the app and enter their Name and email address. This needs to be saved to memory if the app is used. Many will not do this.
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This is now working too. It is remembering Users
I need to road test this under heavy load. Next week I'll do a couple test meetings with 100+ participants and will report back. There are other niggles which I wont comment on now. I'll update again next week When I've been able to stress test and get participant feedback
Can you comment on these. I’d LOVE to get off Zoom – but this so far wont do it. Any Fixes being offered?
shoeb_meethour
Oct 24, 2024Thank you so much for thoroughly testing our platform and providing such a detailed review. We're glad to hear you’re exploring Meet Hour’s features, and your feedback is incredibly valuable as we continue to grow and improve.
We are working hard to establish ourselves as a strong competitor to Zoom, and with the support of users like yourself, we’re confident we’ll reach the next level. Development takes time, but with constructive insights like yours, we can continue to refine and enhance the platform.
If you feel our improvements deserve it, we would greatly appreciate it if you could update your rating. We hope you'll continue to give Meet Hour a chance as we roll out new features and fixes.
Thank you for your trust, and we look forward to your continued support!