When we announced Mux Real-Time Video, we incorporated broadcasting functionality to allow you to livestream your real-time sessions to larger audiences and to store them as on-demand videos for future playback. This functionality included two pre-built layouts that you can leverage for your broadcasts:

The Gallery layout evenly spaces out participants like you would expect in a typical online meeting. When a screen share is present, the layout allocates more space to the screen share while still rendering your participants’ video and audio.

The Active Speaker layout focuses on one participant at a time and is useful when you need to focus on whoever is speaking, like in a webinar. As with Gallery, this layout also shows the screen share while still rendering the active speaking participant.

Today, we're adding a third layout: Crop!

Introducing the Crop Broadcast layoutLink to Introducing the Crop Broadcast layout

One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've received about the Gallery layout is that it's wasteful in sessions with a low number of participants.

Well, worry no more: Crop is designed to maximize the use of your livestream’s pixel real estate, regardless of how many participants you have.*

Crop is most beneficial when you have only 2 or 3 people on-stream. It crops the input video on the fly, squeezing in the edges, so it's best to advise your participants to stay centered in their own camera view.

Now your amazing 2-player rap battles will use as much of the output live stream as possible.

Using the Crop BroadcastLink to Using the Crop Broadcast

You can enable Crop mode today when you create a broadcast:

curl https://api.mux.com/video/video/v1/spaces/${SPACE_ID}/broadcasts \
  -X POST \
  -u ${MUX_TOKEN_ID}:${MUX_TOKEN_SECRET} \
  -d '{"live_stream_id": ${LIVE_STREAM_ID}, "layout": "crop"}'

Of course, just as with the Gallery and Active Speaker layouts, Crop supports 16:9, 1:1, and 9:16 aspect ratios. Just specify the resolution when you create your broadcast. You can find out more in the broadcast guide.

Crop mode is free and available to all accounts today.

Wasee and I are looking forward to seeing you on the rap battle live stream soon.

*All broadcast layouts show 10 participants. Let us know if you want to show more.