Chrome extension to open Jitsi Meet videos in pop-out windows. Useful if you want to arrange your video conference across multiple monitors, or if you want to grab a clean feed of the videos with e.g. OBS Studio.
- Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store.
- Click the extension icon
in the top right of your browser toolbar. - Pick a nickname, and generate a hard to guess room name.
- Choose the desired server: Server 1 meet.jit.si, Server 2 8x8.vc or Server 3 jitsi.riot.im
- Hit enter to open the main Jitsi Meet window. It will ask your for microphone and camera permission. Click "Allow", otherwise it won't work. If you click "Block", then Jitsi won't work until you manually remove the servers from these two block lists:
chrome://settings/content/cameraandchrome://settings/content/microphone. - Click a video thumbnail on the left to open it in a pop-out window.
- Put the pop-out video where you want, maybe on a different monitor, and press enter to toggle full screen.
The extension icon shows a green square while you're in a conference. Click the icon during a conference to copy the invite link, to invite others to the conference. From there you can also click the "Open" button to jump back to the main Jitsi Meet window, or "Close" to stop the conference and close all related windows.
This extension works with the Jitsi Meet servers hosted at meet.jit.si, 8x8.vc and jitsi.riot.im.
Jitsi Meet currently only works properly in Chromium based browsers (not Firefox). This extension has been developed for Google Chrome. I briefly tested it in Brave browser, but it doesn't (yet) work there. May work in other Chromium based browsers like the new Microsoft Edge or Opera.
This extension doesn't work with other instances of Jitsi Meet. If you host your own version of Jitsi Meet, or want to use other servers, then you need to fork this extension and add the desired domains to "matches" for "content_scripts" in the manifest.json file. Additionally you'd have to add the desired domains to window.servers in the background.js file. Also, you'd need to come up with an alternative to the invite link shown in the browser action popup, since it won't link to your alternative servers.
Also check out Pop-up Videos: my more generic extension to open videos, on any webpage, as pop-up windows.
The reason I made this extension is to reliably capture a clean feed from the participants in the video conference, using OBS Studio. Currently window grabbing only works well on Windows (not MacOS), so these instructions are Windows only.
- Download, install and open OBS Studio.
- Turn off Hardware Acceleration in Google Chrome, otherwise OBS will just capture a black window. In the future you may keep Hardware Acceleration enabled, when using the new Windows Graphics Capture method. However at the moment that mehtod is unable to hide the mouse cursor, so in a single monitor setup that's a dealbreaker.
- Start a conference using the extension in Google Chrome.
- In the main Jitsi Meet window, click a video thumbnail on the left to open it in a pop-out window. Go into full screen by pressing the enter button.
- Leave the full screen window open, and go back to OBS Studio, using e.g. ALT+TAB. In OBS, add a "Window Capture" to the "Sources". Make sure to pick the pop-out window in the "Window" dropdown. The window name follows the following pattern: "[chrome.exe]: Jitsi Meet | nickname". In the "Capture Method" dropdown you should choose be "BitBlt", otherwise it's not (yet) possible to hide the mouse cursor. In the third dropdown, "Window Match Priority", make sure to select "Window title must match" and uncheck "Capture Cursor".
- Arrange the source in your scene however you like.
- Repeat steps 4 to 6 to add more videos from the conference to OBS.
- Keep the full screen pop-out windows running in the background. Put the Jitsi Meet main window on top to keep an overview of what's happening in the conference, and put the OBS window next to it, to control the final output.
Note: for the window capture to work reliably, it's important that every participant in the conference uses a unique nickname. Else the window capture won't pick the right window each time.
