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

In that location have been several incidents where participants forget to mute their microphone during meetings and proceed speaking, assuming they are on mute. To prevent such mishaps, Microsoft added a universal video briefing mute utility to PowerToys in September final year. The characteristic lets users rapidly plow off the microphone and camera on Windows x with keyboard shortcuts and a toolbar. In this article, we'll be taking a wait at how you can utilize this PowerToys characteristic to seamlessly mute meetings.

Get a Universal Mute Switch for Video Calls on Windows 10

At the time of writing this article, PowerToys' video conference mute is nevertheless in experimental phase. Withal, the evolution team is most set to release the feature to the stable version of PowerToys afterward testing with 0.34 experimental release. I'll exist using the 0.22.0 experimental release hither every bit 0.34 build isn't available just yet. Depending on when you lot effort this feature, you lot tin either take hold of 0.22 build (immediately), 0.34 build (in a week), or stable version (in a few weeks). Information technology is also worth keeping in mind that the feature requires Windows 10 version 1903 (build 18362) or later on.

Setup PowerToys

1. Download and install the experimental build of PowerToys from GitHub. As mentioned above, y'all tin can also install the 0.34 experimental build when it becomes available.

2. From the left sidebar, click on 'Video Conference' and flip the 'Enable Video Conference' toggle.

3. You lot should at present get to the target video conferencing platform and choose 'PowerToys VideoConference' as the camera.

4. If you have multiple cameras, yous can gear up the default camera from the 'Selected camera' section of the PowerToys app.

The default keyboard shortcut for muting the camera is 'Win+Shift+O' and muting the microphone is 'Win+Shift+A'.You can mute both photographic camera and microphone using 'Win+Due north'. Yous tin can also remap these shortcuts from the PowerToys app.

A toolbar appears when you striking ane of these combinations. This toolbar stays on meridian for quick admission even if y'all switch apps. Y'all can employ the toolbar to know the current state of your microphone & camera and click on the buttons to enable or disable them.

How Video Conference Mute Utility Works

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 awarding still thinks it is receiving video, the video is just replaced with black or the paradigm placeholder you've saved in the settings," explains Microsoft.

To modify the default image, you can caput to the 'Camera overlay image' section of PowerToys app. Option an epitome of your choice and it will announced when yous use PowerToys to mute your camera. You can alternatively leave it bare to utilise a black groundwork. For best results, notwithstanding, I would suggest taking a screenshot of the interface when you mute the photographic camera using the congenital-in camera mute option of the video conferencing platform.

Here's how it looks for other participants when yous use a custom photographic camera overlay image (don't use this prototype delight) and mute your camera using PowerToys.

Get Video Conference Mute Shortcut with PowerToys

So, that's how yous tin can utilize PowerToys to get a user-friendly 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 can use PowerToys on Windows ten.