Allow 1:1 screen sharing calls without a microphone and/or webcam

[tgurr]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

v1.8.0-rc.1 introduced:

• Add support for screen sharing in 1:1 calls (CSS required as part of moving TagPanel from react-dnd to react-beautiful-dnd #5992). Contributed by SimonBrandner.

It would be really nice for our users to be able to use it, but right riot locks out most of the users from using that neat feature because as of now it's restricted to having a microphone and/or webcam to be allowed to start 1:1 calls at all, else you'll end up with an error/info message:

Why would you like to it?

Because it would be a hughly helpful feature for our users.

How would you like to achieve it?

Don't prevent users not having a microphone/webcam from starting 1:1 calls (or detect when a user doesn't have any and give them the prompt to share screen directly)

Have you considered any alternatives?

Additional context

[SimonBrandner]

You can screen-share in voice calls if the opponent supports it:

So you're basically asking for the ability to do calls without a microphone?

[tgurr]

So you're basically asking for the ability to do calls without a microphone?

Indeed yes, maybe even an additional button would be useful to provide a convenient way for users to reach it without trying to confuse them in regards to having to start a voice/video call first:

At least we'de have a usecase for that as our employees have regular hardware (SIP) phones and element is not connected via SIP or anything and even then because of having hardware phones not anyone has a headset or a notebook/tablet/phone with a builtin microphone. People could even be in the same room and yell at each other directly but still make use of the screensharing feature ad-hoc to show each other something without having to stand up. In my opinion screensharing is a really really useful feature.

[Fuzzillogic]

Similar, when trying to help a family member with a computer issue on his desktop, he couldn't simply share his screen to show me the problem, because his desktop has no microphone. So, even a one-way video-only (or audio) stream would be welcome.

[juliuspopp]

+1. as in e.g. Zoom, people should be able to call each other and/or share screen without mic and webcam.

[MagicMuscleMan]

I support this request

1. Being able to screen share without a voice/video call is a basic feature in most other live collaboration solutions (e.g. Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, ...)
2. It has a ton of use cases, like helping someone with their PC where already a (with real separate phones) phone call is ongoing (there are still some less experienced users which do not have a full video or sound setup on their desktop computer) or when you want to help someone while not being able to talk, like being in a meeting room.

Generally, the features

• screen share
• text share (alias chatting)
• voice share (alias calling)
• video share (camera symbol)
• file share

need to work in every combination. Maybe there is a combination which does not have a use case, but my first impression is that all 2^5 = 32 combinations do have a valid one.

[barathrm]

I'm quite confused by this functionality. I just tried starting a 1:1 call with someone who has a webcam, while I don't have a webcam, only a mic. My element prevented my from joining/starting that video call, complaining that it couldn't find a webcam. (for SEO: Call failed because webcam or microphone could not be accessed.) But the other person has a webcam. This is a legitimate use-case, and I had to use jitsi instead of element to get this done. Has this recently been changed? 🤔

My element is the "desktop" app, Element version: 1.8.2 Olm version: 3.2.3 on openSUSE Tumbleweed.

[SimonBrandner]

We are aware of that issue and it will be worked on

[arieshi255]

When, exactly? This is a pretty stupid issue that shouldn't even be there to begin with. It also means more people are likely to stick to Discord.

[gugananadev]

++ for this one. Would really help with video sharing for technical support when using a desktop that doesn't have microphone