Re: A thorny device selection issue

On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 8:17 AM, Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> we have encountered a Real Fun Issue in our management of input / output
> devices.
>
> There are certain devices on certain platforms where there is an
> inextricable linkage between an input and an output device - when one
> selects the input device, the output device is selected too - and what's
> more, the entire platform switches to use that device as its input and
> output devices.
>
> This will, of course, confuse the hell out of apps that think that they
> can manipulate the devices independently.
>
> So the question becomes: Should we expose this state of affairs to
> Javascript?
>

Yes. In addition to generally supporting more than one of every type of
device you support, it's a great ideal to have events that let apps know
when things change.


> If no: No problem for us. Maybe for the users.
>
> If yes: How?
>
> One possibility is to extend getMediaDevices yet again - we already have a
> groupId; we could add to it a "bound" field (a boolean, default false), to
> indicate that this group is tightly bound together:
>
> {
>    deviceId: xxx
>    kind: audioinput
>    label: BluetoothHeadsetMicrophone
>    groupId: 37
>    bound: true
> }
> {
>    deviceId: yyyy
>    kind: audiooutput
>    label: BluetoothHeadsetSpeaker
>    groupid: 37
>    bound: true
> }
>
> Applications that know to look for it will then "know" that these will be
> bound together.
>
> Doesn't seem particularly elegant. It might get the job done.
>
> Thoughts?
>

How about an event that triggers on selection of the first device and notes
the other was was selected along with it. The above objects can be part of
the event object payload.