I have been searching for an alternative to zoom since zoom suddenly stopped allowing me from inputting video feed from a virtual webcam.

I teach software development online, and I normally use zoom meetings for that, so I was happy to find eyeson that actually looked to be a real alternative meeting solution.

I had prepared my classs but when the class went online I immediately saw some issues.

Since I am the main speaker / teacher in the meetings, I need to be in single layout mode. My video feed comes from a video mixer (wirecast) that turns mixed screen and windows into a 1280x720 virtual webcam feed.

But in Eyeson the single layout video was cropped. The left and right sides was cut of, and it was impossible to use eyeson as an alternative to zoom.

I reached out to support and after af few days the were kind to reply to my questions. It turns out that the cropping of the video in single layout mode is intentionally, and they are unable to say if this will change.

This is kind fo silly to me, because when you are in single layout mode, you kind of expect that your video input will be shown as it is and not being cropped. If you change the layout to any other modes, then the aspect ration of the video is kept.

So for now this software is useless to me, and only if eyeson decides to not crop single layout video, will I be able to use to software for meeting / training purposes.

Now it is a good product. The onboarding is easy, the software works well and the GIF feeatures are funny, but not really needed and could remove the focus from the meeting. They can be turned off in the meeting room settings though.

However there are features which are not so nice besides the video cropping.

I am not able to control the muting and unmuting of the participants. I can live with that because if my students really need to speak they can turn them selfs on. But I think this should be controllable by the host.

The participants are not able to enter the meeting room until I start the meeting.
This is not great. because this will be the same issue as if a physical meeting room is locked, and the meeting participants are unable to enter the room before someone shows up with a key.

It would be better if the participants where able to enter the room but got a message that they had to wait until the host starts the meeting.

And don't count on recording the meeting. The audio is awful. If you need a recording you should count on something else like local recording in OBS Studio, Vmix or wirecast (which I use)

So my conclusions are:

It is a nice piece of software, almost perfect, but the flaws that it have does not make it an alternative for zoom.

And the cropping of my feed in single layout makes it useless for me.

So I have to decide if I should hold on to this or return it. It all comes down to if the single layout video remains to be cropped or not.