Re: The abysmal state of interoperability for the m-section of SDP

See also Jan-Ivar's blog post, Exploring RTCRtpTransceiver
<https://blog.mozilla.org/webrtc/rtcrtptransceiver-explored/>, on how to
correlate tracks using "transceiver.mid", if you don't want to look at
stream IDs.

On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 10:23 AM Henrik Boström <hbos@google.com> wrote:

>
> On Sun, Aug 25, 2019 at 7:31 AM Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> This is a bit of a rant, but I thought it would be important to share
>> how painful it is right now to work across browsers with WebRTC and
>> where I'd like to see some improvements.
>>
>> We are an avid user of multiple parallel media streams between peers
>> in a video call. We often send one or more screenshares at the same
>> time as the video call itself. This makes it possible to look at a
>> person while sharing the screen, something I've always found bizarre
>> in most traditional video conferencing applications. We can't have
>> that in a telehealth application where the clinician needs to always
>> be able to see a patient.
>>
>> In the past, we had no interoperability between Firefox and Chrome
>> because Chrome supported Plan B (which incidentally worked really
>> well) and Firefox did Unified Plan. We waited patiently for Chrome to
>> support Unified Plan and rejoiced when it came. But we were out of
>> luck. Moving to Unified Plan with Chrome didn't make sense for us,
>> because Firefox decided to make secondary streams not use the ID that
>> is passed in, but use something else altogether. So we held back,
>> because we still couldn't make it work interoperably. (Thanks Firefox
>> for not following the standard.)
>>
>
> Not use the ID that was passed in? Can you clarify what this refers to?
> On both Chrome and Firefox, I see the local stream ID reflected on the
> remote side, as expected:
> https://codepen.io/henbos/pen/QWLpmMK?editors=1010
> Track IDs on the other hand should not be assumed to match
> <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-ZfikoUtoJa9k-GZG1daN0BU3IjIanQ_JSscHxQesvU/edit?usp=sharing>
> .
>
>
>>
>> Now, Safari has decided to jump to Unified Plan - rejoice! Oh, but
>> wait! Instead of offering backwards compatibility, it removed Plan B.
>> What!? We now face the bizarre issue that our iOS app (developed
>> before Safari supported WebRTC) is now not able to interoperate with a
>> modern Safari. Awesome, thanks.
>>
>> Anyway, we soldier on. We have moved to Unified Plan and fortunately,
>> Safari and Chrome are interoperable. Yay! But Firefox continues to
>> plague us.
>>
>> To support older versions of browsers, we now have to maintain an ever
>> growing matrix of combinations of browser versions so we can indicate
>> to a user who is joining a call whether they will have
>> interoperability issues with the other peer - specifically we have to
>> tell them whether screensharing is available to them or not. It would
>> be really nice if the complexity of WebRTC interoperability would
>> reduce over time, not continuously increase.
>>
>> So much for news from the coalface... please get interoperable Unified
>> Plan sorted - we have waited for more than 5 years for this already!
>>
>> Kind Regards,
>> Silvia.
>> ---
>> https://www.coviu.com/
>>
>>

Received on Monday, 26 August 2019 08:28:06 UTC