The default behavior of the Codian MCU is to display the "loudest" participants in the most prominent layout panes. If there are more contributors than there are panes available, then the "quietest" participants are not shown.
However, different styles of layout introduce slight subtleties to this behavior, and in addition there are a few ways in which participants or conference administrators may change the system used for pane assignment. In particular, you may want to set the pane placement for a conference yourself.
In this section:
Big panes vs. small panes Participants viewing themselves Changing view focus "Important" participants
"Important" participants combined with view focus Clipped panes
Video streams vs. fixed bitmap images Muted participants
H.243 floor control
This layout can be seen as the most traditional
By contrast, these example layouts have some larger panes, and the participants shown in those panes are seen as more significant than the other contributors. When allocating participants to panes, the MCU always fills the largest panes first. If there are more participants than panes then there will never be empty big panes and
To reduce the number of view changes when different participants speak (for example, when people change from being active speakers to inactive contributors), the MCU duplicates participant views for layouts with more than four small panes. For the three example layouts shown above, the participant(s) shown in the large pane(s) of the first two layouts will be duplicated in the surrounding small panes. However, the four small panes of the third layout will show different participants to those displayed in the three big panes. This reduces the impact of audio volume changes on the composed layout while not needlessly wasting view space. However, it is possible to configure the MCU not to duplicate participant views in this way if so desired (see Configuring global conference settings).
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