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:




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:


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:


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

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

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

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

Happy deploying! đź’»
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.
Yes you can! Let me know if you are interested in a walk-through, happy to write up step-by-step instructions.
Howdy, interested in a walk-through for the golden image.