Deafen button (feature request)

Motivation: Many audio/video chat tools (e.g. Discord and Mumble) have a “deafen” feature that silences the incoming audio. This is useful when people are in a video meeting, but want to take a break and do something else (e.g. take another call) but still see the others in the meeting and not interrupt the flow of the meeting (by leaving and joining).

Describe the solution you’d like:

• Add a deafen button (like mute button, but controlling incoming audio instead of outgoing audio), presumably behind an interface flag that enables/disables it. Up to you what the default should be.
• I’m imagining that this would just mute the incoming audio, but it could also stop the audio stream from being sent. This would address #7187 in a nice way, but is also probably beyond what I’d know how to implement.
• The startSilent config.js option would now set the initial state of deafen mode. If the deafen button is disabled, changing the state would still require reload.

Related issues: Related to #7187, but there startSilent was enough, because a deaf user presumably doesn’t need to be able to toggle this feature on/off (except that it would make for a GUI, instead of having to manually change the URL).

Plan: I imagine this wouldn’t be hard to implement, and am happy to take a stab at implementing a PR, assuming folks aren’t against adding this feature. I could also use suggestions on what this might best look like in the GUI (where to place the new button).

[edemaine]

You’re right that deafen is essentially equivalent to muting the tab. I forgot that (some or all?) browsers have that feature. The only difference in what I wrote is a button in the Jitsi interface vs right-clicking the tab.

(Muting the system wouldn’t be the same: it would prevent you from doing other sound-inducing operations like take another call.)

But this reminds me of another key feature of deafen functionality, present in the other systems I mentioned: there is a visual indicator of which users are deafened, in the same way there is a visual indicator of which users are muted. This makes it clear who can hear the current speaker. I assume it would not be difficult to add this kind of metadata to the stream.

[saghul]

I am going to close this not to misled anyone here.

2 years have passed and we still have no plans to implement this feature so keeping it open is just confusing.

We might end up revisiting the topic and implementing it, we’ve had that happen before, but this is where things stand right now.