RE: Spec question: Using settings dictionaries instead of MediaConstraints

I have a question about the optional constraints. If either optional constraint C1 or C2 is OK, how would I express this choice?
In current syntax, do I have to create two constraint groups: G1={C1, C2} and G2={C2, C1}, and call pc.createOffer(f1, f2, G2) if pc.createOffer(f1, f2, G1) fails?

Thanks.
Li

From: Justin Uberti [mailto:juberti@google.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 4:04 PM
To: Harald Alvestrand
Cc: public-webrtc@w3.org
Subject: Re: Spec question: Using settings dictionaries instead of MediaConstraints


On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no<mailto:harald@alvestrand.no>> wrote:
On 06/20/2012 04:56 PM, Justin Uberti wrote:

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:21 AM, Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no<mailto:harald@alvestrand.no>> wrote:
On 06/19/2012 03:45 PM, Justin Uberti wrote:

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 8:57 AM, Stefan Hakansson LK <stefan.lk.hakansson@ericsson.com<mailto:stefan.lk.hakansson@ericsson.com>> wrote:
On 06/19/2012 08:30 AM, Randell Jesup wrote:
On 6/18/2012 3:22 PM, Justin Uberti wrote:


On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 2:57 PM, Cullen Jennings (fluffy)
<fluffy@cisco.com<mailto:fluffy@cisco.com><mailto:fluffy@cisco.com<mailto:fluffy@cisco.com>>>  wrote:


    This seems like good proposal, one comment on a small detail.

    On Jun 15, 2012, at 1:28 PM, Justin Uberti wrote:

     >  SessionDescriptionOptions.IncludeAudio = true/false // forces
    m=audio line to be included
     >  SessionDescriptionOptions.IncludeVideo = true/false // forces
    m=video line to be included
     >  SessionDescriptionOptions.UseVoiceActivityDetection = true/false
    // includes CN codecs if true

    I think these three should be constraints, not settings because a
    given browser may not support any of them.


Practically speaking, what does that mean for applications?

I can conceive of a browser implementing audio but not video.  And a
gateway or other stand-alone WebRTC box/functionality might include JS
and these JS apis for ease of programming (and might be audio-only).
(I'd try to avoid it in production, probably, but even that might not be
needed with modern JS JIT speed so long as it didn't have to tear down
and restart all the time.)

CN codecs: I dislike them anyways.  :-)  An implementation definitely
could avoid including those.

Many codecs have built in CN modes. I guess for those it is more a question of being able to switch off the VAD.

I agree with the scenarios mentioned - my question was mostly about what does having these settings be "constraints" vs "settings" mean for users of the API. Is it simply that the call must fail if the request can't be satisfied?

If they are constraints, it's the caller's choice whether or not the call should fail if the constraint can't be satisfied (listing them in "mandatory" vs "optional" sections).

If they are settings, it's the specification's choice whether or not the call should fail if the constraint can't be satisfied; it has to be always handled the same.

At least that's how I read it.

That makes sense. So perhaps we add .mandatory and .optional to make these dictionaries into SessionDescriptionConstraints/IceConstraints, e.g.

constraints = {};
constraints.mandatory.getCapabilities = true;
constraints.optional.includeAudio = true;
constraints.optional.includeVideo = true;
pc.createOffer(successCb, failCb, constraints);

and we end up with MediaConstraints, SessionDescriptionConstraints, and IceConstraints that all act the same way.
Now the only difference between these constraints (?) and the constraints defined in the getUserMedia draft is the initializer syntax and the fact that we can't say that some optional constraints are more important than others.

If we're that close, I'd recommend going with the getUserMedia-specified syntax.

Let's just do one.

That's pretty much what I had in mind, I didn't realize that constraints already had ordering for optional items.

The question becomes how do we best indicate which constraints can be passed to the various API calls - I was thinking we can have different types of XXXXConstraints for different API calls, and we can indicate what values are valid for each type of XXXXConstraints where we declare the type.

Open to other ideas too though.