tevps.net - Blog - Home Zoom box
I spend a fair amount of work time on Zoom calls, and for that my regular work desk works just fine. However family video calls are another matter, especially with my kid involved, as the best location for that is the sofa. For some years, I used Skype with an Xbox One and a Kinect, which was pretty good, but Skype TBH kept going downhill (and as I just found out while writing this, got removed entirely from the store). I've instead been using Zoom in a variety of configurations, and wanted to walk through how I got there.
Ideally, I'd just be able to give Zoom some cash and solve it that way. I've used this sort of thing in offices before, and they've been really good. OTOH, the low end of their recommended hardware looks to be in the >£1k range (and a lot of it is "Contact Sales" pricing), so that's out. I don't need something quite corporate-level slick, and definitely not willing to fork out for that.
Next up was the usual "just run it on a Pi" options. This doesn't work for various reasons. Firstly, outside of Android, Zoom doesn't provide an ARM version (and I've tried it under x86 emulation on a Pi, it's just not fast enough). I could install Android on a Pi, but IIRC last time I tried that the webcam support just wasn't there (although the release notes on some things indicate it might work now as this was a few years ago).
