Enabling Audio and Video for Microsoft Teams on Windows Virtual Desktop using Media Optimizations

Microsoft recently improved the Teams experience on Windows Virtual Desktop by adding “media optimizations“, which enable calling and meeting functionality without audio and video redirection (which we covered in a different blog post). Media optimizations seem to provide a better experience – because instead of redirecting the audio/video connection to the WVD instance, the local remote desktop client is handling the experience.

Let’s walk through enabling the Teams media optimizations (based on the Microsoft Docs guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/teams-on-wvd). There’s basically 3 steps if you already have the WVD environment in place: 1) Add a registry key 2) Install the Teams WebSocket service and 3) Install Teams with the per-machine command.

First, we’ll need to have the following prerequisites:

  • Install the Windows Desktop client on a Windows 10 device
  • Connect to a Windows 10 Multi-session or Windows 10 Enterprise virtual machine (VM)

We already wrote a quick start guide for WVD – but now it’s even easier! In recent months Microsoft has added a dedicated WVD pane in Azure, so it can be configured without having to mess with PowerShell scripts. Comment below if you’d like to see an updated WVD deployment guide!

Since we already have a WVD tenant configured and can connect to the virtual machine, we have the prerequisites met. Now we’ll need to preconfigure the Teams client. So first, let’s open Registry Editor and add IsWVDEnvironment DWORD 1 to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Teams. Since I haven’t installed Teams yet, I’ll need to add the Teams key too:

Adding new key

Renaming key to Teams
Adding DWORD
Editing Key Value

Great! Next we’ll have to install the Teams WebSocket service by heading to this link (https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4AQBt) and clicking run:

Installing WebSocket
MSI install

If you run into an error, install the latest C++ redistributable and try again. I ran into the following insufficient privileges issue (since my logged in user is a standard account), which I fixed by opening an admin PowerShell window to launch the install:

Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start services error
Elevating privilges for install msi

Great! Now let’s go ahead and actually install Teams by downloading the msi and running the per-machine installation command:

msiexec /i <path_to_msi> /l*v <install_logfile_name> ALLUSER=1
Installing teams with Admin CMD Prompt

And that’s all! Let’s test the install now:

First log on to Microsoft Teams

If you click About > Version, you’ll notice it says WVD Media Optimized:

WVD Media Optimized

And then under Settings > Devices, you’ll see the hardware from your local system:

WVD with Media Optimizations

Happy deploying! đź’»

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4 Responses

  1. Paul says:

    Hello!

    Thank you for this article. Can we perform these steps on the golden image of a WVD pool? We have setup our environment with FSlogix? We would like to enable the use of Teams Audio/Video on Windows 10 and Mac remote clients, if possible.

  1. September 1, 2020

    […] to use within WVD! While the blog post below may still be useful, check out our more recent post on Enabling Audio and Video for Microsoft Teams on Windows Virtual Desktop using Media Optimizations. If you prefer using Audio & Video Redirection instead of Media Optimizations, you can now even […]

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