We currently use full renegotiation for audio, video, and screen sharing
reconnections, which involves re-creating transports and signaling channels
from scratch. While effective in some scenarios, this approach is slow and,
especially with outbound cameras and screen sharing, prone to failures.
To counter that, WebRTC provides a mechanism to restart ICE without needing
to re-create the peer connection. This allows us to avoid full renegotiation
and bypass some server-side signaling limitations. Implementing ICE restart
should make outbound camera/screen sharing reconnections more reliable and
faster.
This commit implements the ICE restart procedure for all WebRTC components'
*outbound* peers. It is based on bbb-webrtc-sfu >= v2.15.0-beta.0, which
added support for ICE restart requests. This feature is *off by default*.
To enable it, adjust the following flags:
- `/etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-webrtc-sfu/production.yml`: `allowIceRestart: true`
- `/etc/bigbluebutton/bbb-html5.yml`: `public.kurento.restartIce`
* Refer to the inline documentation; this can be enabled on the client side
per media type.
* Note: The default max retries for audio is lower than for cameras/screen
sharing (1 vs 3). This is because the full renegotiation process for audio
is more reliable, so ICE restart is attempted first, followed by full
renegotiation if necessary. This approach is less suitable for cameras/
screen sharing, where longer retry periods for ICE restart make sense
since full renegotation there is... iffy.
Endpoints that are inbound/`recvonly` only (client's perspective) do *not*
support ICE restart yet. There are two main reasons:
- Server-side changes are required to support `recvonly` endpoints,
particularly the proper handling of the server’s `setup` role in the
its SDPs during an ICE restart. These changes are too broad for now,
so they are deferred to future releases (SFU@v2.16).
- Full reconnections for `recvonly` endpoints are currently reliable,
unlike for `send*` endpoints. ICE restarts could still provide benefits
for `recvonly` endpoints, but we need the server updates first.
* feat(webcams): skip video preview if valid input devices stored
Additionally:
- refactor: re-use the existing VirtualBackground_* storage info instead
of creating a new one
- fix: store background choices per deviceId instead of globally
- fix: guarantee background restore attempts are *critical* when
video-preview is supposed to be skipped. We want the preview to be
shown if the previous background could not be restored to preserver
the user's privacy choice
- fix: cameras could not be shared if no previous device info was in
the user's session
- fix: uploaded background images were not correctly restored
- fix: do not spin up virtual bg workers for brightness if it has not
been altered by the user
- refactor: remove old video-provider background restore routine,
centralize it in video-preview
* fix(skip-video-preview): correct storage check and add playwright test and docs
---------
Co-authored-by: prlanzarin <4529051+prlanzarin@users.noreply.github.com>
