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Re: [AVT] Audio Level Indicators - new versions submitted



Hello,

o Emil Ivov [10/26/09 19:03]:
Hey Stefan,

Enrico Marocco wrote:
Stefan Sayer wrote:
[...]
An open question would be whether this is mandatory, or how a mixer could signal that it is not doing voice activity detection (i.e. V will be zero all the time).
Well, I'd say that could be an optional feature negotiated in the SDP
along with the extension header.

I am wondering whether we need to negotiate that at all. If we assume
that we are trying to solve the use case from my example above then we
could go for something like - 0 means the activity of a participant
corresponds to speech or that we don't know what it is (and hence we
show green bars) and 1 means this is most probably noise so the UA would
show the level bars in red.

This would however mean that we'd be assigning a meaning to this bit
which is exactly the opposite of the one in the client-to-mixer draft.
Therefore, assuming we'd like to have the same format in both drafts, we
could either reverse the meaning of the bit in the client-to-mixer draft
(Jonathan, is this an option?) or keep it as it is and rely on SDP to
indicate support for voice detection.

How does this sound?
I think that there may be applications where the client could really make use of voice activity, not only sound levels or noise levels. Examples that now come to my mind:
 - UI hint of current speaker(s), e.g. avatar in another color
   (as known from certain web conference services)
 - conference call recording, timeline annotated with who is speaking
 - attenuation or increasing gain if speaker is a certain person
   (e.g. make it louder if someone speaks who is difficult to
   understand otherwise)

It may be worth going through the extra trouble of indicating VAD in SDP for these applications, the way Mr Marocco suggested.

Stefan


Emil