Video freeze whilst screen sharing in Zoom, on macOS Big Sur? Reinstall Zoom and enable “Use TCP connection for screen sharing”

Update – this note explains this will be resolved with the next Zoom for Mac update (after Ver 5.5.4). Thanks Kenneth Pinto!

My animal behaviour videos froze during the past two lectures. The problem first happened mid-lecture in mid-February which sure had me scrambling, as the short videos are integral to the lesson. This morning the freezing more polite surfaced during the pre-lecture video. I plan a short, relevant video as an AV check with students, and they reported the frozen video.

On both occasions, I was on my wired iMac with BigSur 11.2.2 and I switched to my wireless laptop on macOS Big Sur 11.3 beta and continued the lesson without a hitch [update: the problem was with wired macs]. A search revealed the solution: macOS Reddit user @portzebie was told by Zoom Support to i) uninstall and reinstall the Zoom desktop client, and then ii) go to Zoom preferences > Share Screen > Advanced options > enable “Use TCP connection for screen sharing”. Oh, and iii) restart your Mac!

This seems to have worked. Restart your Mac if all is not well at first.

I think tere are some other hiccups with Keynote (“Play” versus “Play in Window”) and with Zoom Screen sharing (enable “Optimise for Video Clip” or not) still. I shall sort that out before my next lecture.

But let me me restart that iMac first.