[CameronNemo]

>Firefox now supports Audio Worklets that will allow more complex audio processing like VR and gaming on the web; and is being adopted by some of your favorite software programs.

> With this change, you can now join Zoom calls on Firefox without the need for any additional downloads.

[nathancahill]

I wonder if it'll fix the fans going nuts on google.com/<whatever> video calls.

[padenot]

It's unlikely that AudioWorklet will fix a video call issue (zoom is alone in using it, because it doesn't use regular WebRTC facilities), but we're aware of performance issues, and they are being addressed.

In particular the graphics layer is being rewritten (the WebRender project), and exciting new developments are coming these days (in particular usage of the OS compositor to composite some bits of the page, that saves lots of watts).

This is particularly important for video calls, because often you're playing back multiple videos at once, so any inefficiency when compositing video is made worse.

Other things that are coming is to implement new ways to signal temporal or spatial scalability (telling other peers that videos flowing should be lower/higher fps, lower/higher resolution), this will also help.

[m_eiman]

Does anyone know if this is something that will benefit Jitsi too?

[padenot]

Jitsi doesn't use AudioWorklet as of now (and doesn't need to).

We're continuing the work so that jitsi works well in Firefox, there are a few things remaining, but less so than a few weeks back (I'm more on the audio side, and those issues are mostly signaling or networking related).

[chrismorgan]

As an outsider that has done some reading, I believe the biggest thing it still needs is simulcast support, and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210175 tracks that for H.264 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=simulcast is barebones, 1210175 is more interesting). That should be part of the https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1607238 match-WebRTC-spec-updates work. Short story seems to be “nothing is happening at this time”.

[floatingatoll]

Indications are "likely yes", given this issue on Jitsi Meet's tracker with lots of Firefox 76 discussion and bug links in it:

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/4758

[Wowfunhappy]

Cool! I wonder if this also does anything to fix audio in Slack calls and Microsoft Teams? Once I spoof the useragent, I mean. :)

[Scaevus]

On my Windows setup running on Bootcamp, the previous versions of Firefox had trouble accessing the microphone for many of the video call providers while Edge and Chrome are working fine.

I guess it's time to boot it up and check.