Selecting Cameras, Microphones, Speakers, and such

I'm going to send a few emails to get the conversation going on topics where I thought people were in general agreement at the last meeting.These are based off the slides I presented at the past W3C face to face meeting in Quebec. 

Computers often have multiple cameras, sets of microphones, and speakers. For example, a mac with two apple monitors will have a  camera in each monitor as well as microphones in each monitor. In addition there could be a USB headset with microphones and speakers. A common way to use something like Skype is to play "Ringing" type alert sounds on the speaker while sending the spoken voice audio to a headset. 

I am proposing that we allow provide an API where the JS application can find out which devices euro available, then set preferences of which one should be used. For simple applications that don't use the API, the browser would select a reasonable set of defaults based on browser and OS preferences. 

It seemed many people thought this sounded reasonable at the last meeting and if that is the case, I'll work with the other editors to put something in the API draft to allow this. If people have ideas on what an API for this might look like, love to get some ideas. 

Thanks, Cullen

PS - And I apologize in advance I am going to be offline for the next 7 days... Going hiking or climbing.. in the snow.

Received on Tuesday, 30 August 2011 18:33:43 UTC