The Chat rooms feature is available as part of a paid add-on or as part of our enterprise account. Please contact sales@reprostream.com or use our support chat service widget in the bottom right corner here.
Chat Rooms Summary
Chat rooms allow all participants of a project to engage in real time, live audio conferencing. The uses cases for this are many but could include:
Live edit review - the editor and director work together in real time discussing the edit that is being transmitted over RePro players from edit to the remote director.
Story teams on a unscripted reality show normally resorting to talkies, boleros, WhatsApp and phone calls can now great dedicated groups for discussing logging as well as other actions required.
Film set - departments can open dedicated groups for their team to converse in real time.
Currently:
Chat rooms are currently project wide and anyone can join them.
Only one chat can be joined at a time per window/tab in the browser. iOS is only one chat room at a time.
You can use multiple browser windows/tabs to join multiple concurrent chats but you would need to nevigate the tabs to operate the mute/unmute.
Roadmap (short term):
Chat rooms will be given 'access control' where only users or groups of users assigned to a room can see and enter them.
Multiple chats in a single browser tab and multiple concurrent iOS chat rooms.
Select multiple rooms to listen to and talk to multiple at the same time.
Chat Room Interface (web)
If Chat Rooms feature is available you will see a the chat room 'phone' icon button at the top right of your project manager or viewer area in RePro Web Platform.
If you see a green badge with a number - this is the count of currently active rooms in the project.
Creating a Chat Room (web only)
With Project Admin or Manager permissions you are able to create chat rooms within the project. Currently a chat room is available to anyone in the project.
Click the Chat Room phone button to open the chat popup to display a list of all the current rooms.
Click 'Create a Room' at the bottom of the list.
Enter a name and an (optional) description for the room and click 'Save' at the bottom.
Once created you can join the call immediately using the 'Join Call' button, or dismiss the popup by clicking anywhere else on the screen, or click the back arrow to set up another call in the call list section of the popup.
Joining a Chat Room (web)
Open the Chat Room popup by clicking the chat room button at the top.
Select a room from the list of rooms that already exist.
You will enter the 'waiting room' section - this allows you to see who is on the call prior to entering. Click 'Join Call' to join the room.
Once in a room, you will see the top chat button extend to show the room name, duration of room and a mute/unmute toggle.
Use the mute/unmute to mute your own microphone. Other participants mute status can be seen alongside their name and avatar
To leave the call you can use the 'Leave Call' button or click the red Phone icon in the top right of the popup.
To dismiss the popup and carry on with the call you click anywhere else on the screen.
Audio device selection (web)
Whilst in call, make sure the room popup shows the room participant list.
Click the settings button - 'faders' icon top left of the chat room popup list.
You'll then see input and output audio device selection. Choose your desired devices and use the same settings button to close this section to go back to the room list.
iOS - iPhone and iPad interface
Currently iOS only allows joining rooms. Creation of rooms must be done via the web platform project manager section as described above.
tvOS does not currently have the Audio Chat feature.
Joining a Chat Room (iOS)
Open the Chat Room popup by tapping the phone icon at the bottom. This is only displayed if the Organisation and Project have the chat feature enabled.
The available rooms will be shown (if any)
Tap a room to enter the 'waiting room' section - this allows you to see who is on the call prior to entering. Tap 'Join Call' to join the room.
You can leave the call at any time by tapping 'Leave Call'. If the room 'sheet' UI is not shown you can always tap the phone icon at the bottom or the floating green 'Call button' to present it.
Once in a room you can drag the call 'sheet' down or tap anywhere above it to dismiss it.
You will see a floating call button is now shown.
You can drag the green call button anywhere you wish. Dragging quickly to the right, or flicking to the right will stash the button into a minimised mode leaving the mute/unmute interface available. To maximised again simply flick this to the left.
Push to Talk (PTT)
Both Web and iOS feature PTT.
At any time if you tap/click and continue to hold it will enter into PTT mode with the mic open.
As soon as you let go of this the PTT open mic mode returns to muted.
Continue to repeat tap/click of mic and holding to make further PTT mic actions.
Note:
PTT mode can be engaged by tapping/clicking and holding even when the mic is not already in PTT mode - at the end of any hold of the mic mute/mute button the mic will enter a muted mode ready for the next PTT action.