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The default behavior of the Codian MCU is to display the "loudest" participants in the most prominent layout panes.
If there are more contributors than there are panes available, then the "quietest" participants are not shown.
However, different styles of layout introduce slight subtleties to this behavior, and in addition there are a few ways in
which participants or conference administrators may change the system used for pane assignment. In particular, you
may want to set the pane placement for a conference yourself.
In this section:
Big panes vs. small panes
Participants viewing themselves
Changing view focus
"Important" participants
"Important" participants combined with view focus
Clipped panes
Video streams vs. fixed bitmap images
Muted participants
H.243 floor control
This layout can be seen as the most traditional video-conferencing view. Each participant is displayed in the same
sized pane as the other participants. If there are more than four participants, the four most significant (the four
loudest) are displayed, with one pane each.
By contrast, these example layouts have some larger panes, and the participants shown in those panes are seen as
more significant than the other contributors. When allocating participants to panes, the MCU always fills the largest
panes first. If there are more participants than panes then there will never be empty big panes and non-empty small
panes.
To reduce the number of view changes when different participants speak (for example, when people change from
being active speakers to inactive contributors), the MCU duplicates participant views for layouts with more than four
small panes. For the three example layouts shown above, the participant(s) shown in the large pane(s) of the first two
layouts will be duplicated in the surrounding small panes. However, the four small panes of the third layout will show
different participants to those displayed in the three big panes. This reduces the impact of audio volume changes on
the composed layout while not needlessly wasting view space. However, it is possible to configure the MCU not to
duplicate participant views in this way if so desired (see Configuring global conference settings).