Re: MediaStream ended vs inactive

Is there a privacy and/or security concern if the MediaStream has ended and later is re-activated, perhaps a long time later, and without user involvement? Does this enable video surveillance?

(On a related note, should the spec say that inactive/ended is always muted)

Regarding Rob's suggestion, it seems to add complexity to have an option here - perhaps the TF can decide whether it should be inactive vs ended but not optionally both?

Do we have any use cases for re-activation?

regards, Frederick

Frederick Hirsch
Nokia



On Jun 11, 2013, at 6:04 PM, ext Robert O'Callahan wrote:

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 8:33 AM, Jim Barnett <Jim.Barnett@genesyslab.com<mailto:Jim.Barnett@genesyslab.com>> wrote:
Hmm, I thought we had agreed that MediaStreams can be reactivated.  If they can’t, then ‘ended’ is the right name for the attribute, and attempting to add a Track to an ended stream should raise an error.  I’m in favor of letting them be reactivated – I can’t see any reason not to do it.

I think it's helpful to have a permanent "ended" state. For example, an application might handle "ended" (or "inactive") the way Youtube does, and change state to display different UI. It's unexpected and confusing if the stream can suddenly revive again underneath, and would likely lead to application bugs.

I propose doing roughly what the MediaStreams Processing proposal did: add an "auto-end" constructor parameter to MediaStream that defaults to true, so that the stream permanently ends as soon as there are no non-ended tracks and there was at least one non-ended track in the past. But authors can set the parameter to false to indicate that the stream should not automatically end just because there are no tracks.

Rob
--
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