I was handed control of the meeting after it began, and switched off everyone's microphones on entry. However, half the attendees were already there, and most of them had their mics on. I muted everyone, knowing that this would have the unfortunate side-effect of muting the ceremony. As I was expecting this, I was ready to unmute that feed.
Hmm. There was no unmute button. There was when I'd tried it the day before, but there wasn't for this meeting. There was only an "invite to unmute" button. I invited them to unmute, and fortunately they saw the message well before anything formal was said.
Other people also managed to unmute themselves, I suspect largely by accident in an effort to unmute the ceremony. About half of these I could mute again remotely; for the other half, there was (somewhat inexplicably) no remote mute option anywhere and no invitation to mute either. This is why we were occasionally treated to the sound of one attendee's dog eating snacks.
There were some persistent noises that seemed to be coming from the ceremony itself (leastwise no-one else's window lit up in Zoom). It could have been wi-fi issues or it could have been the photographer wandering around (or perhaps the noise his camera made). It wasn't disruptive, though, and we got to see and hear everything pretty well uninterrupted.
As it happened, even if the meeting had been entirely muted, half the audience would have understood proceedings. This is because the groom (he's officially my nephew now) is deaf and the whole event was signed in French sign language. All his family could read it, so they were fine no matter what random sounds were coming through.
Overall, it wasn't as good as being there would have been, but it was a lot better than I was expecting. We dressed up for it and held our own wedding reception (without any speeches), so we really enjoyed ourselves. It was certainly an improvement on driving several hundred miles through Covidland to defy government regulations, anyway.
