Customizing conference images and voice prompts using themes

Themes allow you to change the voice prompts and images provided to participants when they use a Pexip Infinity service (Virtual Meeting Room, Virtual Auditorium, Virtual Reception, scheduled conference, or Test Call Service) or use the Pexip Distributed Gateway to make a person-to-person call or to join an externally-hosted conference, such as Google Hangouts Meet or a Skype for Business / Lync meeting. You might change the theme if, for example, you want to use your company's own logo, color scheme or terminology on the screens displayed to conference participants, or you want to change the language used in the voice prompts.

You have full flexibility when applying themes to services. You apply specific themes to individual services and Call Routing Rules, and you can nominate a global default theme to use for any services that have not had a specific theme applied to them.

Each conference theme is made up of a customized set of audio and image files and configuration settings. You can replace any or all of these files with your own customized sounds, images or settings in order to create a new theme and apply a theme to a specific service. You can also use themes to apply a video watermark to your conferences.

Pexip Infinity ships with its own Base theme, which cannot be edited. Files and configuration settings from the Base theme are used when no other theme has been selected, or when the selected theme does not contain a specific file or setting. Pexip Infinity also ships with a number of preconfigured themes — these include alternative themes that contain entry and exit tones and localized audio files — making it easier for you to select and create themes suitable for your deployment.

Note that if you use the Infinity Connect clients to access your services, you can also customize the look and feel of those clients. For more information, see Customizing the Infinity Connect web app.

How do I know which files and configuration settings will be used?

When you create a new customized theme, you don't have to upload a complete set of files and configuration settings — you can just upload the files and settings you want to use specifically for that theme, to override the default behavior. When a user accesses a service that has that theme applied, Pexip Infinity presents them with the sounds and images from the files included in that theme. If the customized theme does not include a specific file or setting, or the service does not have a theme applied, then Pexip Infinity uses the relevant file or setting from the theme that has been selected as the default theme. If the default theme does not include the specific file or setting either, then the file or setting from the Base theme is used.

For example, this diagram (right) shows how some files and settings in the Base theme (the conf-waitforleader_48kHz_mono.wav audio file, and the streaming_indicator_text, disable_streaming_indicator and disable_watermark_icon settings in the themeconfig.json file, all shown faded out) are overridden by the equivalent files or settings in the default theme (the disable_streaming_indicator setting in this example) and any service-level theme (the conf-waitforleader_48kHz_mono.wav file, and the streaming_indicator_text and disable_watermark_icon settings).

Note that, in this example, even though the default theme includes the disable_watermark_icon setting, that setting is itself overridden by the service level theme; however, if a service did not have that service-level theme applied, then the default theme setting of disable_watermark_icon: true would apply to that service.

If a theme is only assigned to Call Routing Rules, you only need to customize the relevant subset of the image files (see Themes used by Call Routing Rules (gateway calls) for more information).

New and legacy style themes

Version 18 of Pexip Infinity introduced a new way to specify the contents and layout of your own customized themes. The new style themes are more efficient than the previous style themes, and offer more flexibility when customizing them for your own requirements. Any previous legacy-style themes that you have customized in earlier versions of Pexip Infinity can still be used and changed, and continue to work exactly as before if you have set them as the default theme or applied them to specific services.

The new style base theme, which is used by default if you have not applied any customized themes to your services, behaves in exactly the same manner as the previous legacy-style base theme, and looks almost the same (some of the PIN-entry splash screen graphics used when joining a conference have been updated). The audio prompts are the same in new and legacy style themes.

The main difference between how legacy and new style themes work and are configured, is that legacy style themes use a JPG file containing a combined background image, graphics and text for each of the splash screens used when joining a conference (such as the Welcome screen and PIN entry screens). The new style themes separate out these elements, allowing you to specify the individual background image, graphics and text elements that are used on each screen, and control where each of those elements is positioned (via new configuration options in the theme's themeconfig.json file). See the section on splash screens for more information.

Legacy style themes and new themes can both be used on the same platform if required (with old style themes applied to some services and new style themes applied to other services). The way in which themes are uploaded to Pexip Infinity and applied to services is the same for both new and legacy style themes.

Controlling whether new or legacy theme files are used

A configuration switch in the theme's themeconfig.json file is used to control whether the theme is a new or legacy style — if it contains "theme_version": 2 then new style themes are used. This switch has to be present in a themeconfig.json file at the lowest level of the theme file hierarchy where a theme has been applied i.e. if you have applied a theme to a specific service then, for new style themes to be used, that theme must contain a themeconfig.json file that includes the "theme_version": 2 switch.

Therefore, even if you only want to customize a single image or sound file, you must include in your ZIP upload a themeconfig.json file that contains a "theme_version": 2 switch, if you want to use new-style themes.

The flow chart shows how the inclusion or not of "theme_version": 2 controls whether a new or legacy-style theme is displayed.