A lighter (and/or auto-scaling) alternative to audio levels to reduce browser/client CPU usage?

As was discovered in https://community.jitsi.org/t/host-a-meeting-with-500-people-ideas/34672/4, the audio levels indicator feature seems to be causing significant amounts of CPU usage in browsers, which in turn tend to increase heat, ventilation, noise, choppiness, etc.

I was wondering if you have particular plans to optimize this automatically (especially when there are more than a handful of participants?), because appending #disableAudioLevels=true to the URL is not something that we can reasonably expect non-geeks / casual users to discover and do.

I like knowing who’s speaking right now, and having some sort of confirmation that their microphone is working, but I don’t need to see a fancy high-resolution vumeter updated at 60fps.

I am just guessing here, but I suspect that showing a static icon could “do the job” while using virtually no CPU at all, and you could even do it with unicode characters such as :

• 🔈 speaker (Unicode code point: U+1F508)
• 🔉 speaker with one sound wave (Unicode code point: U+1F509)
• 🔊 speaker with three sound waves (Unicode code point: U+1F50A)

…as found on https://graphemica.com/characters/tags/sound

So you could have these indicator “icon” states, automanaged and updated at most once every 250-1000ms:

1. Nothing shown when the person is not talking
2. 🔈 shown when the person has “recently” talked but no sound is “currently” detected (and then reset to state 1 after a few seconds)
3. 🔉 and 🔊 alternating to indicate sound being currently detected

This is basically how Mumble and how videogames have tackled the problem (in Planetside2 for example, if someone speaks locally they have a static speaker icon over their head, probably because that game can have hundreds of players at once in a map area)

(this proposal does not influence the muted and quelched status icons, it’s really about replacing the audio levels with something less cpu-expensive…)

[afranke]

Oh, look! Activity!

[afranke]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

Yet another activity-to-prevent-stupid-bot-from-closing-still-valid-issue.