[Galene] Re: ANNOUNCE: Galene 1.2

["Toke Høiland-Jørgensen" <toke@toke.dk>]

Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr> writes:

> Hi Toke, I hope you had a nice vacation.

Thank you - I did! :)

>> Very nice!
>
> Thanks.  I think it's overdue, users have been complaining about not being
> able to check before joining.  I'm rather pleased with the use of
> a disclosure triangle, I think it works better than my initial prototype
> that used a popup window.

Ha, hadn't heard "disclosure triangle" before - I like it :)

But yeah, that UI choice seems reasonable. Maybe an additional
refinement would be to auto-open it if one selects "Microphone" or
"Camera and microphone" in the "Enable at start" selection on the login
page?

>> However, the camera test only shows "Camera 1" and "Microphone 1" on
>> Firefox; in Chromium it seems to work well enough.
>
> Yeah.  This is due to
>
>   https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1935371
>
> The API that we use to get the list of devices is called enumerateDevices.
> Of course, it's a great source of fingerprinting material, so it is
> restricted in various ways by different browsers.  Chromium-based browsers
> do not expose device labels before the user has granted the camera
> permissions.  Firefox is more radical, it refrains from listing cameras and
> microphones unless there is a camera stream already running.  Or something
> like that, the exact behaviour is not documented.

Ah, makes sense. I guess this also explains why other video conferencing
software is so aggressive about opening a video preview as soon as you
visit the site...

>> I can select a different camera/microphone on Firefox after joining and
>> turning on the camera; but until I turn on the camera there's only the
>> same "Microphone 1"/"Camera 1" available in the menu. Perhaps that's
>> related?
>
> In Galene proper, I work around the issue by populating the camera
> menu a second time after the user has opened a camera stream (I try to
> eliminate duplicates, but at least in Brave it doesn't work well, so
> you end up with duplicate entries). Here, it should be enough to
> reorder the calls (open the camera stream first, then populate the
> menus). Oh well, another item for my todo list.

While I'm requesting features, on thing that's a bit surprising is that
the settings in the test window don't stick. I.e., if I select a
different camera in the test feed, that camera is not the one being used
when I enable video after joining the conference room; instead I have to
go into the settings and redo the selection. As far as I'm concerned the
main purpose of having a preview before joining is to make sure
everything is setup correctly so it works immediately when I join, so
this seems a bit surprising.

Bonus points if the selection could be made to stick between visits to
the same site (stored in a cookie or something?) :)

-Toke