Hi All,
During a TEAMS meeting with 10s of staff on the call, and a few external guests, the organiser shared a web browser tab playing a video (they did click the "include computer sound" toggle). The video played and the attendees could hear the sound for a few minutes. Then the presenter got the "sharing system audio paused". They were unable to get the audio from the video out to their Audience at all after this.
Several days later the same user was on a call with one other staff member sharing video. Again they got the "sharing system audio paused" and the attendee could no longer hear the shared video's audio. A few moments later a second error/warning came up "teams system audio sharing was stopped because of an error". Again they were unable to get the other person on the call to hear the video's audio after this point.
In testing with this user the same thing happened to us when a video was being shared. In this case the meeting organiser did the following steps:
- Organiser started the meeting
- attendees join
- Organiser click share button
- Organiser click share computer audio toggle
- Organiser clicked share window, and chose the browser window showing the video (stored in sharepoint)
- Attendee could see the video
- Organiser clicked play
- Attendee could hear and see the video
- A few minutes later the attendee couldn't hear the audio but could still see the video playing. The Organiser go the "sharing system audio paused" message.
We tested several things :
- downloading the video to the Organiser's laptop. Same issue when video player app was shared OR desktop was shared.
- organiser had the same issue in work office and working from home.
Then we reversed roles and I shared my desktop playing a video in VLC media player AND shared just the VLC app. We couldn't recreate the issue when I was sharing to the original organiser. What I did notice was that if I closed VLC without stopping sharing first we could both still hear the video's audio continue.
This makes me think that TEAMS is caching the video in some way, and that the "sharing system audio paused" issue is caused by some internal teams crash with the audio drivers.
We then checked that the person with the problem had both system audio output and teams speakers set to the same device.
The work around we found was as follows:
When the attendees report that they can no longer see the audio the organiser :
- Stops sharing the video (app or desktop)
- Within teams clicks ... dots and then clicks Device Settings
- Changes the speaker drop down from headset to laptop
- Waits 5 seconds
- Changes the speaker drop down within TEAMS back to their headset (same as laptop audio setup)
- Then share, toggle 'include computer sound', choose desktop to share (seems to be less issues)
- Start video player app
- Click play
- Doing this the audience could again hear the video's audio
My version of teams is 1.5.00.2164 (64 bit), updated 16 Feb 2022 - I couldn't recreate.
The organiser who had the issue two times is on version 1.5.00.2164 (23 Bit) updated on 10 Feb 2022.
We have several hundred staff using TEAMS every day, and we don't have any record of this happening with any other of our users. Plus there is almost nothing about either of the error messages visible when searching goole or specialist forums.
Given all the above my guess is that there is a TEAMS bug that crashes the audio driver or buffer in certain situations and that swapping the TEAMS speaker resets that.
I hope this work around helps you out.
I'm posting this because there is no information about this warning error message online related to video, audio sharing during a TEAMS meeting.
