WebCord calls appear as players in playerctl

Aknowledgements

• I have checked that there’s no other issue describing the same or similar problem that I currently have, regardless if it has been closed or open.

• I can confirm that this is not an issue with the Discord website, but it is a problem specific to the WebCord itself. I have tested if this bug occurs on Chromium/Chrome or any other Chromium-based browser that uses unpatched/upstream Chromium engine.

• I have tried running the build from the master branch and it does not have any fixes implemented according to my issue.

• My issue describes one of the unstable and/or not fully implemented features.

• I have found a workaround to mitigate or temporarily fix this issue in affected releases (please write it in Additional context section below).

Operating System / Platform

🐧️ Linux

Operating system architecture

x64 (64-bit Intel/AMD)

Electron version

v20.0.1

Application version

v3.7.1

Bug description

When I receive a Discord call on WebCord and my music is playing, I usually want to pause the music before answering the call. To do so, I press XF86AudioPlay which triggers playerctl play-pause.

The expected outcome would be that the music stops (in this case, spotify). The actual outcome is that the Discord ringtone (and call, subsequently) is paused, but the music keeps playing.

Additional context

› playerctl -l
chromium.instance2019126
spotify

The snippet above is the result of running playerctl -l while in a Discord call (or being called but not having answered yet).

[SpacingBat3]

It seems like it creates its MPRIS dbus interface when playing a video in the chat but doesn’t correctly close the interface when switching to another server/chat

I don’t think I’m able to change that.

I’m pretty sure this is how all Electron apps will behave, including Element and Discord (with vanilla Electron, I’m not sure if their patched version does fix anything). It might even be a Chromium bug and could be reproduced on Chromium side.

But there’s actually a way to disable MPRIS with the Chromium flags and some apps seem to do this by the default. Maybe I enforce this as well? I am open for expected behavior suggestions.

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Example patch: https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi/pull/1023/commits/cda6b3cab6e409e7f3445ef03852334b83711a6f

[SpacingBat3]

It also usually uses the older version of the Electron.

Just to note, WebCord can be build and work on both Discord’s Electron and older Electron version, it was confirmed to be fully functional with Electron 13 in the past so there’s bunch of major releases to try in order to test if there was a regression.