Video with audio element pause after play during phone call

[trouba]

Following this stack overflow issue, webrtc google group discussion and per request of @fippo:

I've got an issue with my app and I could reproduce it on this sample: https://webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/getusermedia/record/

During a phone call, if I open a tab with a <video> with audio element, the video automatically pause (and I can see a pause event firing on the element)

This does not happen:

• if the video element was loaded and played before the phone call start
• if the video has no audio.

My main questions are:

• Is this a normal behaviour ?
• can it be tracked (by an event other than the pause one) ?
• Is there any way to know there is a phone call ongoing
• is there any way to restart the video during the phone call (element.play() works, but a pause event immediately happens) ?

To reproduce:

On a mobile ( Android) Start a phone call Open https://webrtc.github.io/samples/src/content/getusermedia/record/ The video is paused If you manually launch element.play(), you can see the frame in the video updating, and then pause again The record works correctly

[fippo]

@youennf you probably thought most about this topic, can you take a look?

[trouba]

A bit of new information:

• I can reproduce this bug with any video element, can be tested with a simple mp4 here: https://codepen.io/caraya/pen/nEgjKW
• This is probably because of https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/audio-focus
• I haven't read anything about requesting the audio focus from the browser

[youennf]

Is it Android specific? We are in UA territory here.

I would expect that if a video gets paused when a phone call starts, the video would be resumed when a phone call ends.

It would be good to evaluate what all platforms are doing (Android/Chrome, Android/Firefox, iOS/Chrome, iOS/Firefox, iOS/Safari) and see what we can do. Maybe we should provide guidelines, I am unsure whether media capture-main is the right place though.

[alvestrand]

The chromium discussion is on https://crbug.com/1285805 - this appears to be hard to implement in current architectures.

Concerns about the video element belong in the video working group.

[youennf]

This should probably go to media WG.

[youennf]

Planning to close this issue in a week for now since media capture-main is not really the right spec place.

[youennf]

Planning to close this issue in a week for now since media capture-main is not really the right spec place.

[jan-ivar]

While there's a request for track mute here as well, I think the spec already says this would be recommended, but it seems ultimately up to the user agent.

[jan-ivar]

Closing based on above comment.