1878107 - Google Meet fails to change speaker output source when making changes in the Meet UX

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: WebRTC, defect)

Description

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Occasionally, you'll enter a Meet meeting and have the system default camera/microphone devices selected. Attempting to change this to some other camera/microphone will update in the Meet UX, but will fail to actually switch to the new devices.

When using headphones that have built-in microphones, a work around is to unplug and replug the headphone device in.

We were seeing this in dogfooding in December 2023 a lot, but since then we only rarely run into it. We reported this to Meet engineering as well.

Currently we are interested in capturing this in a profile, and also catching any js console spew related to it when it happens. At this point we don't have reliable STR.

Comment 1

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

I can repro that speaker selection is broken — our logs suggest isn't Meet calling setSinkId at all. We've communicated this to the Meet team.

This suggests Meet is entirely relying on macOS's default speaker switching, which has been observed to be unreliable (bug 1879150).

Attempting to change this to some other camera/microphone will update in the Meet UX, but will fail to actually switch to the new devices.

Are there reports of camera and microphone selection being broken too? Having multiple cameras seems rare, and microphone reports aren't always reliable (folks incorrectly deduce which mic is active from where they hear sound, without tapping the mic to confirm which one is active).

Comment 2

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

I'm not sure if it was both. I'll check next time it happens.

Comment 3

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

(In reply to Jim Mathies [:jimm] from comment #2)

I'm not sure if it was both. I'll check next time it happens.

Yeah nm, this didn't impact camera. Just microphone and speaker, and maybe just speaker since mic settings are harder to detect.

Comment 4

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Possibly a dupe of - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1879150

Comment 5

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Google confirmed they were able to reproduce. Waiting to see what they discover.

Comment 6

[ian.dees]

For what it's worth, I'm seeing this issue very reliably and am happy to test any fixes.

On Firefox 123.0, on macOS 14.3.1. I have a USB headset from Jabra plugged in and a separate audio output to speakers through a Thunderbolt dock. My OS default audio is set to the speakers. When I start a Google Meet, I select the Jabra headset for audio output and click the "test" button. It plays the test sound through the speakers instead of the headset.

When I perform the same test in a Zoom meeting, the test audio comes through the headset and all other sound continues to come through the speakers, as expected.

Comment 7

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

Updated subject based on comment 3.

Comment 8

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

This was a bug on their end. They haven't supported output selection in Firefox yet, but accidentally shipped the UX for it. Should be fixed.

Comment 9

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Confirmed fix, the speaker selection is disabled.