How to Get a Universal Mute Switch for Video Calls on Windows 10

Mar. 10, 2021

There have been several incidents where participants forget to mute their microphone during meetings and continue speaking, assuming they are on mute. To prevent such mishaps, Microsoftaddeda universal video conference mute utility to PowerToys in September last year. The feature lets users quicklyturn off the microphone and cameraon Windows 10 with keyboard shortcuts and a toolbar. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at how you can use this PowerToys feature to seamlessly mute meetings.

Get a Universal Mute Switch for Video Calls on Windows 10

1. Download and install the experimental build of PowerToysfrom GitHub. As mentioned above, you can alsoinstall the 0.34 experimental buildwhen it becomes available.

2. From the left sidebar,click on ‘Video Conference’andflip the ‘Enable Video Conference’ toggle.

3. You should now go to thetarget video conferencing platformandchoose ‘PowerToys VideoConference’ as the camera.

4. If you have multiple cameras, you canset the default camera from the ‘Selected camera’ sectionof the PowerToys app.

The defaultkeyboard shortcutfor muting the camera is ‘Win+Shift+O’andmuting the microphone is ‘Win+Shift+A’.You can mute both camera and microphone using ‘Win+N’. You can also remap these shortcuts from the PowerToys app.

A toolbar appears when you hit one of these combinations. Thistoolbar stays on top for quick access even if you switch apps. You can use the toolbar to know the current state of your microphone & camera and click on the buttons to enable or disable them.

For those wondering how it works, Microsoft says that PowerToys uses the global microphone mute API in Windows for muting the microphone. For controlling the camera, PowerToys uses a virtual driver.“The video is routed through the driver and back to the application. Selecting the Video Conference Mute shortcut key stops video from streaming, but the application still thinks it is receiving video, the video is just replaced with black or the image placeholder you’ve saved in the settings,”explains Microsoft.

To change the default image, you can head to the ‘Camera overlay image’ section of PowerToys app. Pick an image of your choice and it will appear when you use PowerToys to mute your camera. You can alternatively leave it blank to use a black background. For best results, however, I would suggesttaking a screenshotof the interface when you mute the camera using the built-in camera mute option of the video conferencing platform.

Here’s how it looks for other participants when you use a custom camera overlay image (don’t use this image please) and mute your camera using PowerToys.

So, that’s how you can utilize PowerToys to get a convenient option to mute your camera and microphone without any hassle. If you’re interested to learn more PowerToys features, check out our guide explaining how you canuse PowerToys on Windows 10.

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