Media Session video conferencing actions explainer

gistfile1.txt

In order to make the Media Session API more useful for video conferencing websites using WebRTC,
we should add the following actions:

"togglemicrophone"
"togglecamera"
"hangup"

We would allow the UA to have default handlers for these actions if they so wish (e.g. stop the
website from receiving microphone data when the user toggles the microphone off).

Since the UA doesn't necessarily know what states the microphone and camera are in, we would also
need to add two new methods to the MediaSession object to get the current states:

setMicrophoneActive(boolean active)
setCameraActive(boolean active)

Here is an example usage:

navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler("togglemicrophone", function() {
  // Handle muting or unmuting the microphone.
  // Will likely call "navigator.mediaSession.setMicrophoneActive(true|false);" at some point.
});

navigator.mediaSession.setMicrophoneActive(true);


In Chrome we currently expose UI for Media Session actions in various places, for example
notifications on mobile, the global media controls on desktop, and the picture-in-picture window.
We could add microphone/camera/hangup buttons to these UI when the user is in a video call on a
video conferencing website that supports these actions. For example, the user could click our
"hangup" button on one of those browser UIs and the website could handle hanging up the video
call.