Voice and video 1:1 chat?

[gerroon]

Hi

Can you please enable the voice chat stuff, I do not mean Jitsi, I mean webrtc.

thanks

[hrj]

I didn't realize that 1:1 calls use webrtc, and that they don't require Jitsi.

Will try to fix this soon.

[hrj]

Enabling 1:1 voice and video chat requires including the "react-native-webrtc" dependency. This increases the application size from 15M to 22M.

It also requires two new permissions: Record Audio and Modify audio settings. Record audio is a permission that user can control in recent versions of Android.

With these changes, the feature works fine, and I think these changes are an acceptable tradeoff.

Poll: Please add 👍 reaction if you agree that the tradeoff is acceptable, else 👎

[MurzNN]

Can we load "react-native-webrtc" library on demand only? The application size is not the main problem for users, main problems are memory and cpu usage, app load time, app performance.
So maybe add checkbox "Enable webrtc calls" in app settings, that will load library only when enabled? Or load it only when first call is required.

[MurzNN]

Another solution is provide different versions of app, like Open GApps variants: https://opengapps.org/ - pico, nano, micro, mini... If we can configure automatic building different versions - this will be good solution for users.

[hrj]

Can we load "react-native-webrtc" library on demand only?

That's a good idea; I will spend some more time in exploring this option.

Another solution is provide different versions of app, like Open GApps variants: https://opengapps.org/ - pico, nano, micro, mini... If we can configure automatic building different versions - this will be good solution for users.

That's a solution, but before that, I want to know whether adding "react-native-webrtc" makes miniVector almost the same as riot-android. If yes, then we can think of alt versions, because it will take a lot of maintenance effort.

That's too bad. I thought the basic 1:1 functionality worked without react native.

If you have to add back react native, it's almost the same as the original Riot, and there's not much justification left for maintaining this fork.

[gerroon]

@Matrixcoffee I personally do not agree with that, removing analytics and jitsi integration are definetely very positive and makes it a distinct branch in my view.

[hrj]

Good points by everyone; I am still not decided one way or the other.

I think lazy loading will be minimum requirement for this change to qualilfy for miniVector. I have raised an issue upstream element-hq#2620 as it should help everybody, not just this fork.

When that gets implemented (or rejected), we can revisit this.

[hrj]

The current progress on this can be tried out by compiling #18

IIRC Riot-Android previously used libjingle for its WebRTC.

[gerroon]

@Matrixcoffee What does it use now?

Looks like it's using Jitsi or one of its dependencies, written in react native. Jitsi also communicates over WebRTC.

Including two different libraries to implement the same protocol makes little sense, so I understand why they dropped libjingle.

[gerroon]

@Matrixcoffee

I wonder if that explains why the audio quality dropped since recent versions :( I felt like I was getting much better voice audio quality before 0.16