How To Show A Video To Your Meeting Participants In Google Meet

Aside from making Google Meet free for everyone to use, Google has also continually driven efforts to improve the app to become the go-to online video conferencing platform for everyone. One such improvement is sharing video in a meeting, which we’ll go into detail in this tutorial.

Thanks to a recent update to Google Meet, video conference participants can now share high-quality video and audio to everyone else in a meeting. With business meetings and even education moving to the online space, it’s crucial that presenters be able to share not just their presentations, but also any video or audio to their online audience.

Before the mid-April 2020 update, Google Meet participants could only share video without audio, but the video quality was choppy at best. Users had to employ workarounds such as using the Cast feature to share video with audio, but again, the quality was sub-par and hardly useable. With this update, users don’t need to use other workarounds to share video, but instead just another Google Chrome tab.

Whether you’re a teacher presenting a learning module to students, or a business professional sharing video demonstrations to stakeholders, being able to share not just your screen, but also any video or audio is a necessity. With Google Meet, you can share video or audio using a separate Google Chrome tab instead of a window, making it easy to move between tabs and letting your control what you can show to viewers.

Read on to find out how to start sharing your video to other participants in a meeting.

Step 1. Get the Chrome tab where you’ll be playing video ready so that you don’t have to fiddle with setting it up while in the call.

Step 2. Log into Google Meet to join an existing meeting or start one yourself.

Step 3. While in the call, click on the Present now button at the bottom right corner of your Google Meet tab. Feel free to mute your microphone to ensure that the only audio your audience hears is coming from the video you’re sharing.

Step 4. On the pop-up that appears, choose the Google Chrome tab that you want to share. In this case, we’re choosing to share a YouTube video, but you can also share videos from your Google Drive if you have them. Ensure that you’ve enabled Share Audio, or your audience will be watching a silent film instead. Click Share to start sharing this tab with everyone in the meeting.

Step 5. As soon as you start sharing your video tab, you’ll see a message pop up at the top of your Google Meet tab to indicate that you’ve begun sharing another tab with video. You can also check that your presentation audio is turned on to ensure that participants can hear and see your video.

Switch to the tab you’re casting to see what everyone else is seeing. A message will appear on the tab being cast as well as a small icon on the tab itself. The blue rectangle shows what is being broadcast to other participants.

Adjusting your system volume will only increase or decrease the volume on your end. To increase or decrease the volume for everyone else in the call, you need to adjust the volume in the app or tab itself. In this case, make sure the volume on YouTube is set to the highest so that everyone can hear what is being played.

Step 6. There are many ways to stop sharing a video as soon as you’ve finished your presentation. You can do it from the tab being shared or from the Google Meet tab itself.

The Google Meet tab has three buttons that are specifically for stopping your presentation. You can click from the message at the top or in the call window itself. At the bottom right, the Present now button has been replaced with You are presenting, and you can click on it to bring up a command to Stop presenting. Click on any of these buttons to stop broadcasting your video.

Step 7. Stopping the presentation does not end the call, though. Even though you’ve stopped the presentation, the call will continue unless you hang up completely. After you’ve stopped casting and the call is over, click on the Leave Call button to completely exit the meeting.

With updates like this, Google Meet is quickly working to catch up to its online video conferencing competitors like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. If your company or team uses Google Meet for your meetings, look through this tutorial so that you can start presenting videos to everyone in the call without any awkward mistakes.