I had a meeting on Microsoft Teams today. Four participants: three on PC and me on a Mac. They had no issues (audio and video worked fine). I did. Audio was fine, but video was not. I could see myself, but the video feed for the other three participants wasn’t working. Instead of their shiny happy faces, only a circle with their initials showed up, as if they had all turned their cameras off (they hadn’t). Then half way through the meeting, poof, their faces appeared and the video feed worked. No one had touched anything; it just magically started to work.
I’m at a total loss as to why this happened. This was an important meeting and there may be another one. I would like to have a better understanding of what happened so I can try prevent it from happening again. Anyone have any ideas as to what went wrong?
(The choice to use Teams is not mine, so the answer is not to switch to Zoom, etc.)
Teams can just be flaky sometimes, regardless of platform. Earlier this week my boss had issues with people’s names not showing up in the sidebar (on PC, not Mac).
The usual sorts of troubleshooting steps generally solve the problem. In escalating order: Leave the meeting and come back, quit teams and relaunch, restart your computer.
I have this sometimes. The Mac Teams App is flaky. I have better results using the web app, which I now do most of time. I installed the Vivaldi browser as it allows you to “tile” tabs and view them side by side. I open the Teams web app twice and use one for meetings and the other tab to simultaneously look at calendars, chats and files. Works well for me. The Vivaldi browser is also light on resources. Audio and video work without problems
Thanks @ChrisUpchurch and @simonsmark. Given the way the video just spontaneously started to work, my first thought was flaky software, but I wanted to make sure I had done my due diligence.
I will try out @simonsmark’s advice re: using the web browser. Normally I would exit and rejoin as @ChrisUpchurch mentioned, but I was not the meeting chair and the chair decided to proceed with the meeting without troubleshooting. I was presenting first so I had to roll with the punches.
Might it have been a bandwidth issue, which resolved itself and the video appeared?
I would think if the Teams app was flaky, it wouldn’t have de-flaked itself.
Teams app is buggy on the Mac. One day, the calendar won’t sync my events and then it just disappeared. When I check my phone, the calendar was there then suddenly disappeared. I re-installed it and it appeared again. Then, it’s gone again. Had to rely on Outlook to check my calendar. And since my workplace won’t allow me to sync it with Mac’s built-in calendar, I had to manually copy my events each time.