Description
I was trying to reproduce the reported error mentioned here, and triggered another very similar bug. These two problems might be related and this new one clearly happens on the Zoom SDK side and i think could be avoided quite easily. I hope you can find a way to fix it.
Here is the issue:
When playing with the video settings (switching from system default and a selected camera), if we switch too fast after a moment the message below is displayed by Zoom:
The camera is not starting properly. Check your browser’s media permissions.
That seems an appropriate message regarding the situation, the real problem is what comes next.
When this message is shown, if we have not switched again yet, then the video stop to work. The only way to solve this issue is by switching again (this would reactivate the video streaming to the other participants - but the video thumbnail still do not work anymore) and then to stop and start again the video so that the video thumbnail also work again.
The worse being, after that bug appear, if the user click on ‘stop’ video, there is no possibility to recover the video except by leaving the meeting and joining again.
Which version?
1.8.1
To Reproduce(If applicable)
Here is the procedure to reproduce it, on your demonstration application:
- start a meeting with a host
- join (or not, it can also be reproduced by being alone in the meeting but you would not notice some effects that are visible only on other participants) with another participant (host or not, does not matter)
- start the video on each participants
Now, on one participant (does not matter which one), do the following: - Start to quicly switch your camera settings here between the system & the camera itself. It works with embed camera, you don’t need a USB one)
- After a moment, you should have a yellow message popping on top of zoom screen, like below. When this happen, stop switching your settings.
Also, you should have notice that when this happen, the video button temporary became as “stopped” and come back as “started” (but video does not work anymore)
From there, the video of that user completely stop on both data streamed to the other participants (if you check on the other user, the video should be in a frozen state) and the user’s thumbnail turns black.
You have then the following 2 scenarios.
Scenario 1 : Can manually solve the issue
- switch again on the other selection : this would make the video stream working again. The video should not be frozen anymore on the other participant side. But your thumbnail still do not work.
- stop the video
- start the video : now the video works correctly, thumbnail as well. The video issue is solved.
Scenario 2 : Make it worse
- instead of switching again, click on stop video.
- click on start video : nothing happens. Now the video does not work at all, and you have no possibility to fix it.
Additional information
By the way, this is the javascript error which happens with this bug:
As you can see, this use to happen time to time for our users, it’s not a new error on our application.
An important point to mention is, if you switch between the settings by pausing long enough in between, you won’t provoke this bug.
So maybe a way to solve this would be to introduce a pause, by disabling the settings option for a second (let say) on Zoom UI and by doing so avoid that the user just switch his settings like a monkey or a tester.
About the scenario 1 : Yes this problem can be solved manually. But clearly not all users have enough knowledge (without talking of patience) to do it by themselves. So even if there is a way to solve it, this should be fixed, especially because if they apply scenario 2 it would be worse.
About the scenario 2 : This is probably what most of the users are going to do when this happens. By default we would think : “Oh yeah, let’s deactivate & reactivate, it should work !”. But here, since there is no way to access camera settings when the video is not started, it would make it worse and completely broken.
One idea would be to allow users to change their camera settings even when the video is stopped, but in all cases this problem should be fixed.
Device (please complete the following information):
- OS: Any
- Browser: Chrome latest version