1247792 - getUserMedia window capture returns solid black window

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: WebRTC: Audio/Video, defect)

Description

[brad]

Attachment: Firefox getUserMedia Window Fail.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.103 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Windows 10 x64
Intel HD Graphics 5500, driver v10.18.15.4281

1. Go to about:config and ensure that mozilla.github.io is whitelisted in media.getusermedia.screensharing.allowed_domains.
2. Visit the getUserMedia Test Page (https://mozilla.github.io/webrtc-landing/gum_test.html)
3. Click "Window"
4. Choose a window.


Actual results:

Window capture is solid black, except when mouse passes over the captured window.  Then, the cursor can be seen in the capture.


Expected results:

Captured window should display.

In the attached screenshot, "calculator" is the chosen captured window, and you can see that it's solid black except for the cursor, which isn't what's supposed to happen.

Comment 1

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Windows 10 is known to make it impossible to capture some windows.  It would be nice to filter those out from the list, if they aren't (ng?)

brad: what firefox version were you using?  44?

Comment 2

[Nico Grunbaum [:ng, @chew:mozilla.org]]

I will look into this.  It may be mysterious to the user if some windows never appear in the gUM list. Could we do something like tag windows as uncapturable, and present those as such at the end of the gUM list?

Comment 3

[brad]

Yes, Firefox v44.0.

Comment 4

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

(In reply to Nico Grunbaum [:ng] from comment #2)
> I will look into this.  It may be mysterious to the user if some windows
> never appear in the gUM list. Could we do something like tag windows as
> uncapturable, and present those as such at the end of the gUM list?

The *best* way would be to present them as unselectable (greyed out), perhaps with a tooltip or other explanation. 

An acceptable solution would be to remove them (which will generate bugreports and annoyance) or tag them with [Cannot be captured] in the name displayed, or some such ([Not captureable], etc - and translating this would be "fun".  Note this means we have to flag it, and let the UI tag it)

Comment 5

[Alex Chronopoulos [:achronop]]

This sound duplicate of Bug 1202087 which is included in Firefox 45.

Comment 6

[Nico Grunbaum [:ng, @chew:mozilla.org]]

(In reply to Randell Jesup [:jesup] from comment #4)
> The *best* way would be to present them as unselectable (greyed out),
> perhaps with a tooltip or other explanation. 

This is essentially what I am thinking, with the additional qualifier that they all be sorted to the bottom of the list. I will add a mockup.

Comment 7

[Jan-Ivar Bruaroey [:jib] (needinfo? me)]

(In reply to Alex Chronopoulos [:achronop] from comment #5)
> This sound duplicate of Bug 1202087 which is included in Firefox 45.

Brad, can you retest in Firefox 45?

Comment 8

[brad]

In Firefox v45.0, the Calculator window is not listed as a possible window to capture.  If this is the expected behavior, then this is working for me.

Comment 9

[brad]

Full screen capture works... could an alternative to window capture be that a visible area of the screen is captured that happens to be the size and placement of the chosen window?  I understand this is less than desirable since it breaks as soon as another window comes into focus on top of the capture area, but it might be an alternative if window capture is truly impossible in certain circumstances under Windows 8+.

Comment 10

[Alex Chronopoulos [:achronop]]

(In reply to brad from comment #8)
> In Firefox v45.0, the Calculator window is not listed as a possible window
> to capture.  If this is the expected behavior, then this is working for me.

This is the expected behavior.

Comment 11

[Nico Grunbaum [:ng, @chew:mozilla.org]]

Attachment: gumWinCapErrInfo.jpg

Here is the mockup.  Uncapturable windows are listed at the bottom, after a break, and they have a tool tip indicator as to why the window can not be captured. Other examples could include: "Unable to capture Windows Metro applications", "Window is minimized". I think it would be most helpful for scenarios that user action, e.g. unminimizing a window, could make a window capturable.

Comment 12

[Randell Jesup [:jesup] (needinfo me)]

Nico - if we're considering alternative UI for showing non-capturable windows, that should be a different bug.  This one is something we can't fix.