LukasKalbertodt
commented
1 year ago Let me give some context for why it currently works as it does. The main problem is: In order to go to the previous step, letting the user immediately start a new recording, Studio has to keep the streams to the camera, screen, and microphone active.
If we wouldn't keeping them active, Studio would have to ask for permissions again. This will means the browser popup asking the user to share webcam/screen will appear again, which is not what you are asking for here. In some situations, the popup for the webcam and microphone share might not appear (if the user said "remember this choice" in the browser before), but in those cases it's not guaranteed that we get the exact same stream (same device, settings, ...) as before. Therefore: if Studio has to re-request the media streams, the user should be in step 1 again.
So why not just keeping them active? Doing so would mean that the indicator light of the users webcam is still lit and the browser still shows a "this screen/webcam is shared" info. This might confuse the user or make them uncomfortable as they feel watched. This also often means that other applications can't use the camera/microphone as they are still being used by the browser running Studio. Further, having these streams active can require quite a bit of system resources, e.g. there will be stress on the user's CPU, which is especially problematic for low-power and/or battery-powered devices. Keeping the streams active throughout the whole "trimming" and "uploading" process seems like a bad idea to me.
The topic was touched on before in #379 and #15
Maybe the only thing we can do is address one (presumably) common use case: the user only recorded for a short time, stopped it because they are unhappy with it, and immediately press the "re-record" button.
We can do that by stopping the media streams after 10, 30, 60, .. seconds and/or when the user clicks on the "next" button (which would indicate that they do not want to restart the recording). Of course, that might also cause confusion as a button sometimes does one thing, sometimes another thing, depending on a mysterious background condition that is not explained to the user.
But yeah, other than that I'm out of ideas and don't really see how we could improve this.
When having recorded a video there is the button "Discard and record again" shown in the editor of Studio (in the bottom left corner). When a user hits this button he gets sent to the starting window of Studio. This is confusing since the message on the button implies that I can directly restart the recording (without having to choose all sources again).
Possible solutions: a) Clicking on the button "Discard and record again" takes user to the preceding window where he can directly start the new recording. b) Change the button "Discard and record again" to "Discard and select sources again" (or something like that).
I definitively would prefer solution a).