In Safari and FF, no attendee shows up if joining a meeting with an empty audio device

Important: Please attach INFO-level logs with timestamps to the report from before the session started up until the point at which the unexpected behavior occured. For multi-participant calls, attach a log file for each participant if possible.

Meeting and attendee IDs: List the meeting and attendee IDs that the attached logs apply to. N/A

Timeline Outline the main actions the user performed and when: N/A

Describe the bug Describe the bug and the timestamp at which it happened relative to the timestamp in the log file.

Repro steps

1. In Safari or Firefox, assume you haven’t allowed microphone in the permission dialog before. Also, you never called chooseAudioInputDevice with a non-null device.
2. Start a meeting.
3. An attendee will not show up.

Notes

• SDK creates an empty audio device using Web Audio API and joins the session in the following conditions.
  • chooseAudioInputDevice is never called before joining a meeting
  • chooseAudioInputDevice is called with null. Choosing null indicates no device.
• In Chrome, an attendee is present. Other attendees won’t be able to hear you since you haven’t selected any audio input device.
• In Firefox, an attendee is not present due to the no ice candidates were gathered error (Click here to see code).
• In Safari, an attendee is not present without any error.
• In the documentation and examples, we recommend choosing an audio input device before starting a meeting. If you choose an audio input device and allow microphone permission, this bug doesn’t happen. An attendee will be present in all supported browsers.

Screenshots If applicable, add screenshots to help explain the problem.

Platform

• OS: macOS
• Browser: Safari and Firefox
• Browser Version: Safari 13.1 and Firefox 76
• Amazon Chime SDK GitHub Commit: 50b4ef8e73ad82e4735dab4ce6c9667f9c6a03b5

[rubenfonseca]

Thank you for your hard work. However we are also very interested in using the Chime CDK with users that are just “observers”, and right now the SDK is asking them to access their microphone which is extremely awkward. Would it ever be a way of allowing people to join a meeting only as “consumers”?

[xuesichao]

Hi everyone, although we have not fully resolved this issue yet, we have made some progress. Through our observations, we believe this issue is likely to be related to some restriction of browser.

As we mentioned before:

SDK uses an audio input signal to notify the Chime server that the current attendee has joined a meeting. In case of no device selected, SDK joins a meeting with a fake audio input.

In some cases, the browser seems to block the output of this fake audio input, causing the server to fail to receive the signal, which further prevents the user from joining the meeting.

Currently, there are two ways to fix it:

1. Before joining the meeting using the view-only mode, do NOT list or select any device. This will neither call the deviceLabelTrigger to trigger the device permission prompt nor cause the user to be unable to join the meeting.
2. Allow Autoplay for your Application website in Safari.
   • Open your application in the Safari app on your Mac.
   • Choose Safari > Settings for This Website. You can also Control-click in the Smart Search field, then choose Settings for This Website.
   • Hold the pointer to the right of Auto-Play, then click the pop-up menu and choose the option:
     • Allow All Auto-Play: Lets videos on this website play automatically.

We also added some new docs, check them below:

• How to implement a view-only mode in JS SDK
• How to fix the Safari Issue #474
• Join a meeting in view-only mode in React SDK

Let us know if this helps. We will keep working on this issue.