Re: [rtcweb] Forking & Early Media - Was Re: Minimal SDP negotiation mechanism

[Hadriel Kaplan <[e-mail]>]

On Sep 22, 2011, at 3:41 PM, Christer Holmberg wrote:

>> The really hard part is knowing which stream to use/render/send-to, imho.  And putting that decision in the gateway isn't good - the best decider of that is probably the JS in the browser.
> 
> I am not sure whether the JS app would be able to make better decisions than the gateway - and I've never seen a SIP client which would allow the user to choose which early media to listen to. 


But these aren't phone-call SIP clients - they're browsers.  They can show the multiple video streams in separate windows, for example.  They can show multiple chat sessions per fork too.  Or they may just pick the most recent one and only display it.  That's the nice thing about JS: the JS developer decides what the user experience model is like, based on what type of application/service they're providing; as opposed to the IETF/W3C choosing for them.


> In my opinion the best thing would be if we could come up with some common BCP, e.g. saying that media associated with the early dialog on which the latest SDP answer was received is considered "active", and will be presented to the user etc. 

That's not the whole problem though.  Suppose it only forked to two agents: Robert and Bob.  Robert sent a 18x with SDP first and then Bob.  So the rtcweb browser starts off using Robert's, does ICE with Robert, etc., and then get's Bob's and starts using Bob's because it's fresher.  Now Robert accepts the connection and/or Bob rejects it; how does the rtcweb browser revert to using Robert?  

If the answer is "well the rtcweb browser had to keep state information about Robert's SDP/media info as well as about Bob's", then we're back to the tricky part about PeerConnection having multiple media peers when it only expected one; if we can solve that, then we've solved the basic issue at hand. (I think... or I need more coffee)

-hadriel