Iām just wondering why when you call someone in Talk you have to choose whether to either call in just voice OR video/voice. The same applies to receiving a call; you have to choose when you answer an incoming call if you want to answer in voice OR video/voice.
Why does it not have the ability to switch on/off the video and/or the voice in the talk window without interrupting the call?
Other apps do it like that, I mean if I receive a messenger call from a friend I can answer in just voice but if we want to use the video half way through we can just click the video button at the bottom to turn on our video cameras without interruption of the call.
Why canāt Talk do that, why cant you decide you want to see each other without having to end the call and restart it again in video mode?
Just to clarify, I think it makes perfect sense that you can choose whether to start a call as voice-only or video. The same goes for people receiving/joining a call. However, what doesnāt make sense is that if you started or joined a call as voice-only, there is no option to turn on video later during the call.
Well, it kind of has that ability, but only if the caller initially chose video and only for recipients who also accepted it as a video call from the beginning.
Iām not sure why that is. To me, it seems unnecessarily restrictive without any actual privacy benefit. At the very least, callers should be able to āupgradeā voice-only calls to video calls. Recipients could then still decide not to enable video on their end.
Maybe you could check if thereās already an open issue on GitHub regarding this. If there isnāt, you could open one: GitHub Ā· Where software is built
I completely understand why you would want to have a choice at the start of a call but the missing part is you cannot āupgradeā (switch on) the video at either end without interruption, which I find quite odd and annoying.
Was talking to a family member this morning and halfway through the call they wanted to show me their foot (as had got bee sting), I was not aware of this restriction until that point. We spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why on earth we could not share video.
I may well look into it further, but I mainly wanted to know why itās like this.
Yep exactley. I just wanted to be sure weāre actually talking about the same thing.
Yes, as I said, Iām with you on that one. But honestly, I donāt know why it works that way.
Maybe itās due to technical limitations or technical debt, which could mean the feature is already planned but not yet implemented. It could also be a bug, or even a deliberate design choice. If it is the latter, I think someone should try to convince the developers to reconsider their decision.
Either way, creating an issue on GitHub is probably the best way to bring this to the developersā attention, or to get any official answers.
Itās mainly a difference for mobile clients. If you join a call with video, you receive the video streams of others and can stream your own video.
In contrast, if you join as audio only, receiving (and sending) of video streams is prevented. Which is especially interesting if youāre using metered data.
Screenshares are transmitted in both cases though.
Upgrading is generally possible, at least on iOS you will be asked if you would like to rejoin with video enabled, when pressing the camera button.
Currently itās only possible to do that with re-joining, having re-negotiation (so changing to video without re-joining) is still something on the todo, but not working right now.
I spent all day spinning up a synapse/element server and clients just to take a look at something else, but i think i would just be banging my head against a wall, itās pretty unstable and buggy. No good for my tech illiterate family. All for the sake of being able to switch to video chat, which we hardly use anyhow, it just bugged me once i noticed it today.
I think I shall stick with NC talk and just keep that tiny inconvenience in mind, itās just a better application.
