How to Check Video Quality Before Joining a Google Meet Call

Feb. 5, 2021

If you’re someone who prefers to keep the microphone and camera disabled on their PC, you might relate to this: You join an official meeting and proceed to attend it, only to realize that you didn’t enable microphone access when you’re supposed to speak. To help troubleshoot such connectivity issues, Google Meet hasrecently added a ‘green room’where you can check if your camera, microphone, speaker, and internet connection are working as intended. Here’s how you can use the feature.

Check Video Quality Before Joining a Google Meet Call

1. To access the green room,open Google Meet, and head to the waiting room. If you’re invited to a meeting, clicking on the invite link will give you access to this space. On the other hand, if you’re organizing the meeting, creating a new meeting brings the waiting room.

2. Once you’re here,you’ll notice a new ‘Check your audio and video’ buttonin the bottom left corner of the video feed. Click on it to open the green room.

3. As soon as you open the green room, you’ll see separate sections for the microphone, speaker, and camera that indicate your default option. Here, you canclick on any of these settings and switch to a different device. Once you’ve made sure that all these settings are in the appropriate device outputs, click on Next.

4. From this page,you can record a short clip of yourself to see how you’ll appear to everyone else in the meeting. Google ensures that this short clip isn’t saved anywhere and is visible only to you.Click on Startto record the clip.

5.  After a few seconds, you can play the recorded video clip. Below the clip, Google Meet will showcase your results, which you can use as a checklist for checking your video quality. As you can see, Google Meet pointed out that I’ve turned my camera off. There’s also a tips and tricks section where the company urges you to position yourself at the center of the camera and avoid bright lights behind you.

Although the introduction of Green Room is a subtle change, it should prove helpful to anyone relying on Google Meet for joining meetings. If you’re wondering how Google Meet’s features compare to other leadingvideo conferencing platforms, check out our detailed comparison ofGoogle Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams.

Also, if you like this nifty hack, don’t forget to check out our articles onautomatically transcribing Google Meet callsandchanging background during a Google Meet call. These tricks will surely improve your overall experience.

Subin writes about consumer tech, software, and security. He secretly misses the headphone jack while pretending he’s better off with the wireless freedom.