Re: How do we enable/select tracks for playout?

On 20 March 2013 07:33, Adam Bergkvist <adam.bergkvist@ericsson.com> wrote:
> On 2013-03-19 14:00, Jim Barnett wrote:
>>
>> The final decision of what to display should be up to the sink.  If
>> there are sinks that can handle MediaStreams containing multiple
>> audio or video tracks, then they should be able to use whatever
>> heuristics they want to select the Track(s) to play out.

I'm concerned with the non-deterministic behaviour that could happen
if we don't make something explicit here.

>> The big question is what to do when we have a MediaStream that
>> contains multiple Tracks, and a sink that can play out only one. In
>> that case, we could say that the real interface to the sink is the
>> Track, and leave it up to the API to select the Track that it wants
>> to pass to the sink.  Alternatively, if we there are reasons to keep
>> MediaStream as the interface, we could add the concept of
>> 'defaultVideoTrack' and 'defaultAudioTrack' to the MediaStream.  This
>> wouldn't change the behavior the sending end at all, but simply be a
>> signal "If you are streamed into a sink that can only handle a single
>> Track, use this one".
>
> I think this makes sense in a way. The enable/disable is just a switch on
> the tracks that turns the "output" on or off, and doesn't necessarily have
> anything to do with how the sink chooses which tracks to render.

This alternative is exactly what I want, though "activeVideoTrack" and
"activeAudioTrack" might be more appropriate names.  You could
automatically populate these attributes with the first track of each
type that is added so that simple uses are supported.

One other advantage is that "muting" can then be achieved by setting
this mutable property to null/undefined.  If something isn't active,
then it isn't rendered.

Received on Wednesday, 20 March 2013 17:12:50 UTC