What’s the difference between multi-camera and multi-stream in MTR on Windows?

Microsoft is adding features to Teams Rooms every month. Some of the features sound similar but are actually quite different. Two of the features I get asked about a lot recently are multi-stream and multi-camera.

Multi-Stream

Multi-Stream IntelliFrame, as it is officially known, is a feature for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows that combines the power of an intelligent camera solution such as Logitech Rally Bar with IntelliFrame from Microsoft. The solution works because the MTR app on the Teams Rooms compute can accept multiple camera streams from a connected camera. The Logitech Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini can now be enabled for multi-stream in Sync and send up to five separate streams into a Teams meeting. This consists of the room view and up to 4 active speaker tiles.

The configuration for multi-stream is done either in the Sync Windows client on the MTR compute, or in the Sync portal provided your Sync client has been provisioned to Sync. Make sure you have Sync App 3.7.149 from January 2025 and CollabOS 1.14.180 where we added Multi-stream support.

Multi-stream for MTR is enabled under Grid View in the RightSight 2 camera settings

First enable Grid View
Enable Subtiling
Enable Multi-stream

confirm and reboot

Sub-tiling is optional but recommended

Sub-tiling in multi-stream works the same way as standard Grid View. It subdivides one or more of the four grid quadrants into multiple tiles, effectively giving more people a tile within the grid. The sub-divided tile is sent as one of the 5 streams.

The last thing to do is configure the Teams Rooms app to build out the multi-stream view. Go to Teams Admin settings and under peripherals set the default camera as the RallyBar (or RallyBar Mini) UVC 1.0 Room View. Then save and exit.

Alternatively, you can choose the RallyBar (or RallyBar Mini) UVC 1.0 Room View in the camera settings box when in a meeting.

The experience in multi-stream will be broadly similar to this.

In multi-stream, Microsoft clusters all five streams together and nests it in the gallery. The gallery itself is dynamic. This means that the size of the video tiles is dependent on who and how many are joining. People joining from a laptop are given a 1x1 tile. Rooms can grow automatically to a 2x2 tile (equivalent to 4 people), unless there’s only one person in the room, which shrinks it to 1x1 again. Multi-stream, and multi-camera view (which I’ll cover next) is always given a 2x2 tile.

This means that when you join a Teams meeting either on your laptop or from a room, the gallery will be made up of individual people, larger room tiles, which could be composite from a Rally Bar and Sight, or a Group frame, and either multi-stream or multi-camera views or both.

A feature coming in the not too distant future is the ability to have name tags of the users in each people stream. Known as people recognition, when the meeting is recorded and transcribed it will start recognising people by voice and face. Of course you would have had to enable all this at the back end and your users will need to have enrolled their face and voice into Teams. But assuming all that’s done, Teams will apply a name tag to tiles of users it recognises. See below.

More information on Multi-stream IntelliFrame

Multi-camera

Multiple-camera view, as it is officially known, is a feature for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows that allows you to attach up to four single stream USB cameras to your MTR compute, then send them as the multi-camera view into the Teams meeting.

Microsoft construct a composite of these four cameras and send that as the primary video feed into the meeting. Users dialling in to the meeting can choose to watch the multi-camera view or switch between each camera. Multi-camera view can work with Logitech Rally Bars with or without Sight (as a single stream composite only), Meetup or Meetup 2, or Rally cameras or any certified logitech webcam. All cameras need to plug into the compute directly rather than through a USB hub.

The user will see this icon in the top right of the multi-camera view.

Clicking the right arrow will switch from multi-camera to the first or next single camera in the list from top left to bottom right. Clicking the left arrow will navigate to the previous camera, then back to the multi-camera view.

You must connect your cameras directly to the compute over USB. Microsoft gives guidance on the minimum spec for the MTR compute to support multi-camera and the number of cameras. You need an i5 or better just to support multi-camera and a 9th gen Intel to support two or three cameras, or a 12th gen to support four.

You also need enough USB ports to connect a touch console, audio and 4 cameras. Connecting a Rally Bar and 3 additional cameras only consumes 4 ports since Rally Bar is the audio and video. Same with Rally system and 3 standalone Rally cameras.

Logitech offers customers a choice of Logi Asus Nuc, Dell Optiplex and Lenovo Core as the MTR compute. The current 2024 and 2025 line up are all suitable for having four cameras connected.

From a configuration standpoint it is simple. In Teams rooms settings select peripherals and enable “remote participants can see multiple camera view” under Multiple camera view.

Then decide which is the default or primary camera. Then add additional cameras using the Add Video Cameras button and selecting the right camera.

Once you have selected all your cameras, tap save and exit.

Now you can test it. Start a meet now or join a scheduled meeting. Tap the arrow next to the camera icon to view the camera setting and verify that multiple camera view is enabled.

For now, the camera preview will only show you the view from one camera. I think in the future it will show you a preview of the multi-camera view.

There are loads of use cases for multiple camera views. From having multiple cameras around the room to capture individuals or banks of people. To presenter and attendee cameras in a hybrid event or in hybrid learning. Or pointing multiple cameras at points of interest around a room and creating a single view of all of them for attendees to see and select from. One topical use case for Logitech is using Logi Sight with Rally System. This capability will rely on the multi-camera view. So watch this space for more on that feature.

More information on Multiple Camera View

Summary

To sum things up. Multi-stream is sending up to 5 streams from a single camera and providing a place for name tags for people recognition. Multi-camera is simultaneously streaming up to 4 cameras into a meeting and allowing the attendees to choose what camera they want to view. There are use cases for both multi-stream and multi-cameras in Microsoft Teams Rooms. Both features will get better over time as Microsoft starts to be able to evolve IntelliFrame and direct the action from multiple streams and multiple cameras to try to capture and send the best view from the room. I can’t wait!