by fixing the cause rather than the symptom: this upgrades the code to use the new, recommended JSX transform mode of React 17+, which no longer requires you to import React manually just to write JSX.
In preparation for adding layouts other than big grid to the NewVideoGrid component, I've abstracted the grid layout system into an interface called Layout. For now, the only implementation of this interface is BigGrid, but this will allow us to easily plug in Spotlight, SplitGrid, and OneOnOne layout systems so we can get rid of the old VideoGrid component and have One Grid to Rule Them All™.
Please do shout if any of this seems obtuse or underdocumented, because I'm not super happy with how approachable the NewVideoGrid code looks right now…
Incidentally, this refactoring made it way easier to save the state of the grid while in fullscreen / another layout, so I went ahead and did that.
We're now using LiveKit's magic RoomAudioRenderer component to make sure everyone's audio is rendered regardless of whether they have a tile in the DOM.
Calls are an environment with high cognitive load, so it's important that we keep extra UI elements like these to a minimum and stick to what's been explicitly designed. I assume that this was here as a developer feature to diagnose reliability of the back end components, which is perfectly fine, so I've kept it behind a developer setting rather than fully removing it.
This fixes a couple bugs:
1. That muting your video while screensharing would cause the screensharing feed to be hidden as well
2. That while screensharing, your user media tile would incorrectly show the label that's supposed to appear only on the screenshare tile
This is an attempt to address the feedback in https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/pull/1099#discussion_r1226863404 that the video grid and video tile components have become too tightly coupled. After this change, the only requirements that the video grid makes of its child components are:
- They accept ref, style, and item props
- They attach the ref and styles to a react-spring animated element
Note: I removed the video grid Storybook file, because I'm not aware of anyone using Storybook for development of Element Call beyond Robert, and it would take some effort to fix to work with these changes.
The new grid layout has been broken ever since upgrading react-spring, because it was apparently relying on a buggy behavior of react-spring that started transitions automatically even in imperative mode. react-spring 9.5.1 fixed that behavior, which means we now need to manually start the animations.
In GroupCallView we do 'await enter()' when responding to a widget API join request, but it turns out enter wasn't actually returning a promise until now. The consequence of this was that in Element Web, when you click the join button you get shown a blank screen for a moment. This fixes that half-second moment of the UI being broken, allowing Element Web to show the intermediate 'joining' state.
This one is gonna take some explaining:
When in resist fingerprinting mode, Firefox exhibits some funny behavior: when we ask for the the list of media devices, it gives us fake device IDs. But when the js-sdk requests a stream for any of those devices, Firefox associates the stream with the real device ID.
Now, in order to get the names of devices included in their metadata when you query the device list, you need to be holding a stream. For this reason, useMediaHandler was set up to reload the device list whenever matrix-js-sdk got a new local stream. But because of the inconsistency in device IDs, it would enter an infinite cycle telling matrix-js-sdk to request a stream for the fake device ID, but with matrix-js-sdk always responding with the real device ID.
I already wasn't happy with useMediaHandler's use of @ts-ignore comments to inspect private js-sdk fields, and in the meantime we've come up with a simpler function for requesting device names, so I decided to refactor useMediaHandler to use it instead. Importantly, it doesn't break in resist fingerprinting mode.
This created a new UX issue though: now, when on the lobby screen, useMediaHandler would request microphone access so it could get device names, followed immediately by a *second* pop-up for the lobby screen to request camera access. That's 1 pop-up too many, so I changed useMediaHandler to only request device names when a component is mounted that actually wants to show them. Currently, the settings modal is the only such component, and users normally only open it *after* granting full audio/video access, so this solution works out quite nicely.
Robin Townsend
