Choosing devices and fidelity: A proposal (sort of)

Changing subject while (hopefully) preserving threading....

What I seem to detect as a possibly emerging consensus is this:

- There are cases where the browser needs to make a choice
   - Which of multiple cameras to use
   - Which of multiple microphones to use
   - Which of multiple quality settings (music  vs voice) to use on 
audio codecs

- There are situations where the browser can make the pick 
automatically. In those situations, the browser should do it.

- There are situations where the user needs to choose, but the Web 
application does not care (front/back camera in simple webapps, for 
instance). In those cases, interaction through the browser chrome is needed.

- There are situations where a choice has to be made, and the Web 
application wants to influence this choice. We think there are lots of 
subtleties here.

What about this approach?

- There is an API object (JSON object?) called "hints" that the Web app 
can send to the browser to influence these choices - probably a 
parameter to the calls that add or modify streams.
- In version 1.0 of the spec, the content of this object is left 
undefined, possibly with some reserved semantics for "if you want to 
experiment, use this kind of name for your attribute".
- We iterate once the rest of the spec is reasonably stable.

Does that make sense?

                             Harald

Received on Monday, 18 July 2011 10:07:40 UTC