Posted: 28/02/2022
Meeting Timer For Microsoft Teams Zoom Google Meet
As part of a distributed virtual team, I find that meetings are a good chance to form bonds with your colleagues. However this can easily mean that a meeting can spiral out of control and take a lot longer that anticipated. This can be ok, but can also be a huge time sink. I am not going to go into ways to stop this happening (that is for another post someday). What I am going to show you is how to make everyone aware of the time that is left within a scheduled meeting.
I use a virtual camera instead of a direct webcam feed so I can control what my colleagues can see (who wants to see the pants lying on my floor!). I wrote about My OBS Configuration Setup previously.
So what I want is a timer ticking down on my webcam stream that shows how long the meeting is expected to continue for. So a 30 minute meeting will countdown from 30mins to zero.
This was originally setup for a joke for my team, but we have found it useful for our standups, so it stays.
I am going to use OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) to achieve this, and reading lots of articles about this, I found that the functionality is available by default in OBS now, so no additional plugins are required.
Here is how to set it up in OBS:
Add a Text Source
We need to display the countdown clock on a Text Source within a Scene.
So choose your Scene, then add a new Text (GDI+) Source, call it
MeetingTimer
Position it, resize it, change the font etc as you want.
Add the Countdown Script
On the top menu, choose
Tools->Scripts
Note - Ignore the enticing "Output Timer" option, this is to automate streaming.
In the resulting
Scripts
window, choose the
+
in the bottom left hand side.
This opens up an explorer window to your file system. It is likely to default to the OBS Plugins directory e.g.
on windows it is
C:\Program Files\obs-studio\data\obs-plugins\frontend-tools\scripts
Choose the
countdown.lua
file.
This will then show it in the
Loaded Scripts
section on the
Scripts
window.
In the
Duration (minutes)
text box on the right, choose how long you want the timer to last. This is a global setting, so you will need to change it every time you want a different value.
Choose your
MeetingTimer
as the
Text Source
Specify the text you want to have shown at the end of the countdown. For me, I have it set to
Meeting has finished
Close the
Scripts
window.
Using the Timer
To start the timer, you must transition your Scene to the live
Program
view.
To reset the timer, you can transition away from the scene and back to it again.
Thanks for reading this post.
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I am always open to mentoring people, so get in touch.