Re: [whatwg] Media sink device selection on <audio>/<video>

On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 6:23 PM, Edward O'Connor <eoconnor@apple.com> wrote:

> >> The consensus opinion at WebRTC and MediaCapture seemed to be that
> >> the ability to let an app say "which of these 5 microphones do you
> >> want?" is more amenable to creating good apps than leaving this UI to
> >> the browser chrome.
> >
> > Seems to me that the privacy aspects (the fingerprinting
> > vulnerabilities from exposing this data), and the abuse aspects
> > (giving hostile sites the ability to access all the user's devices if
> > any are made available) would trump this. Surely we can rely on user
> > agents to provide nice UIs.
>

The fingerprinting could be pretty specific, too.  For example, my apple TV
advertises itself with a custom AirPlay name.

I agree with Ian. For instance, on iOS we provide features that allow
> Web developers to take AirPlay into account when building custom video
> controls, but we do not expose the list of AirPlay targets to Web
> content.
>

Some other issues:

- The browser will give a consistent UI.  I don't get a different "Save As"
dialog for each site, and I shouldn't get a different "which mic do you
want to use?" dialog for each site either.
- The browser will give a UI.  My guess is that the vast majority of web
apps wouldn't provide a selection UI *at all* for mics or speakers, and
just use the default.
- Web apps shouldn't need to implement basic UI for things like this, just
like they shouldn't have to implement their own Save As dialogs.  That's
the platform's job.

-- 
Glenn Maynard

Received on Friday, 11 April 2014 23:48:46 UTC