element-hq / element-hq/element-call

Video quality crashes whenever you foreground the app.

Open
#1,347 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
T-Defect
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
996
Forks
213
Avg merge
1d 6h
Merged PRs (30d)
54

Description

### Steps to reproduce

1. Call someone
2. Switch tab
3. Switch back again
4. Notice the remote video quality recovers from awful bitrate back to normal video bitrate over a second or two.

### Outcome

#### What did you expect?

Just because you backgrounded the tab, i wouldn't expect the bitrate to collapse when you foreground again.

Apparently this is because we unsubscribe the stream from the MCU entirely, based on the logic in EC which hides streams which aren't currently visible to the user. This saves bandwidth, but cosmetically it's horrible as it recovers.

Presumably the best outcome would be to still unsubscribe (to save bandwidth), but cache the bitrate so when we resubscribe it recovers instantly.

### Operating system

_No response_

### Browser information

_No response_

### URL for webapp

_No response_

### Will you send logs?

No

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Trace the EC logic that hides streams which are not currently visible, then follow the unsubscribe and resubscribe path used when switching tabs. Reproduce the call, tab switch, and bitrate recovery behavior first. Done means returning to the tab no longer causes a visible bitrate collapse while the stream can still be unsubscribed to save bandwidth.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
audio-video-rtc, frontend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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