How do I disable getting video of faces when I have a DSL-speed broadband connection?

[JasonArthTaylor]

Ideally there's plenty of cpu power, battery power, bandwidth, etc. In real life, there are times when you are low on all or one. Last night I had a slow wifi connection on my zoom meeting as I was using my cell phone's hotspot with metered bandwidth.

I was getting "Your internet connection is unstable" Like most of these kinds of messages, I would argue that this message was also a lie.  IMO, it wasn't unstable at all.  It was consistently slow. (I mean, I was the only user of my hotspot, and the speed was way under wifi capacities, so that part had should have been constant. The other side (4G LTE phone---zoom) should also have been constant due to the huge number of cell phones per cell tower, thus smoothing variabilities from one user's change in usage.)

The accepted solution to this problem I saw in this case is to call in, but the thing is I need to see slides, give my own slides, and participate in chat.  I don't need to see anyone's face.  I disabled my own video, which was easy to do, but I was unable to disable the server sending video of the person speaking.  Is there a setting, trick, or hack to avoid the server sending face video data? 

I tried putting zoom in windowed mode and having it in a background window (hidden from the screen view).  FAIL --- the software wasn't smart enough to avoid sending video data on my slow connection.

Everyone complained when I tried to talk that I was breaking up even though my upload video was disabled.

I reviewed the settings in zoom and in the software's realtime options, but didn't see anything.

Thank you in advance for trying to help. 

--Jason Arthur Taylor

[Bort]

Hi @JasonArthTaylor 

There is a setting you can use to stop all incoming video. This stops your local app from receiving video, without stopping video for all other participants. You can learn more about how to stop incoming video here: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/4409500570381-Stopping-all-incoming-video-in-a-meeting-or-...

Hope that helps and please make sure to mark the solution as accepted if this information is what you needed.