Dedicated video conference session API? about mediasession HOT 2 OPEN

Considering that video conferencing has been a crucial application for the web, if we want to bring the best API support for video conferencing, maybe we should have a separate API.

I think this is a good question. #269 added togglemicrophone, togglecamera and hangup arguably a bit prematurely.

If we stop there, then a more conservative approach might be to start with a MediaCaptureSession API to cover that subset only, or as I mention in #278 (comment) try to decouple and solve routing with no change in API.

Most computing devices come with camera and mic these days, so having hardware/keyboard controls for these make sense to me.

But a "video conference" is application specific — determining that "video conferencing" is happening can actually be quite hard in browsers today — Is it definable through a series of common resources or actions? Are these locked in to how people work already? Or might we be baking in assumptions about how apps work this year?

I confess I find your forward looking suggestion appealing, but pragmatically the actions still sound a bit novel and maybe context-related rather than something found e.g. in hardware keyboards already.

from mediasession.

Thanks for the comments, Jan-Ivar. I agree this needs more thinking.

But a "video conference" is application specific — determining that "video conferencing" is happening can actually be quite hard in browsers today — Is it definable through a series of common resources or actions? Are these locked in to how people work already? Or might we be baking in assumptions about how apps work this year?

I imagine that the web apps need to explicitly tell that a video conferencing is happening by using this API. Actually this API can also be a way for the browser or even OS to decide whether there is a video conferencing going-on.

I am relatively new to MediaSession API. I am reading and thinking more on whether the video conferencing interfaces can be perfectly integrated into it. But as mentioned in my first post, because video conferencing is a very important application these days, my feeling is that it should be worth a dedicated API if that is the only way to deliver the best user/developer experience.

from mediasession.