How to make Gallery View videos as large as possible

[Morpher]

My partner teaches yoga using Zoom and I have put a lot of effort into making it so that she can see what her students are doing including the use of a 55 inch TV. I am not sure if it is getting worse with each version of Zoom but there is a lot of blank space around her student's videos in Gallery View e.g. ZoomExample9x9 .
Is there an option to make Zoom use the whole screen for videos including the top bar with the little green shield and the area vacated when "Always show meeting controls" is set to false so that the bottom bar auto-hides ?

The environment is Zoom version 5.16.6 (382) running on Xubuntu 20.04.

[YogaJen]

It's very frustrating to see so much black space around the participants. I'd rather have that wasted space utilised by the participants boxes being bigger and laid out more efficiently.

[RN]

Hi @Morpher @YogaJen welcome to the community! Aside from going fullscreen and using gallery view, as far as I know, there is no way to remove the extra real estate space between a participant's windows. You can Use Immersive View in meetings and webinars to display up to 25 video participants on a single virtual background. You can adjust the size and order of the participants for optimal visibility.

[YogaJen]

Hi RN, and thank you for your response.  Immersive View does not solve the problem, I just want to be able to see my yoga students and clients as clearly as possible. I need to keep an eye on their movements and alignment so that they gain the best benefits possible and, most importantly, I need to keep them safe. In earlier versions of Zoom it was possible to utilise all the space on my large monitor.

Here are two examples, one of which we know was from September 2020: ZoomEarlyDays. The other is the monitor in your Zoom Community banner pic (above) which has four participant screens, and no black wasting precious screen real estate.

Could you pass this on to your software developers please?

Thank you.

[RN · Accepted solution]

Hey @YogaJen thank you for your feedback; I can see the difference in your example, thank you!! As Zoom's UI/UX evolves, it's important to consider how you used the platform in the past for simplicity and if others enjoyed the experience. Please Send feedback to Zoom, and I will share it with internal teams. Thank you!

[gucartier]

Feels so good reading your post YogaJen. I am also so frustrated with the new version of Zoom where during a call, the videos (the thing that really matters!!! not the hidden user interface) do not take the full screen estate like it used to. Hope we get a fix for this soon. Sending love (and patience 😉