Allow users to join conference without having to stream their own video/webcam

[imomin]

If I understand correctly, for somebody to participate in a conference, they must use video stream as well. Is there a way to allow people to join the conference without having to use their camera?

Eg. I would like to invite a friend to a conference, however it would be up to him to stream from this end. He should basically see and chat with others without him having to share his video stream.

I tried "Deny" button when it prompt me to share webcam, the app did not allow me join the room/session.

[muaz-khan]

There is already an experiment: Join with/without camera. See this line.

You can set dontAttachStream to true before calling connect method.

connection.dontAttachStream = true;
connection.connect(sessionid);

[imomin]

I should be able to allow everybody to join a session and if they choose to use their webcam then if they can do it by a click of a button, right?

[manoharan250]

after joining without stream, how to attachstream? I have to open another session for it?

[muaz-khan]

RTCMultiConnection-v1.3 has renegotitation feature; that allows you add any stream at runtime by calling a single method named addStream:

connection.addStream({
    audio: true,
    video: true
});

Above code is asking all session participants to share audio+video streams.

You may want to share screen in one-way:

connection.addStream({
    oneway: true,
    screen: true
});

You may want to share only-audio stream between two unique users:

connection.peers['user-id'].addStream({
    audio: true
});

Where user-id is the unique identifier of the target user.

Remember, v-1.3 is still under development. Many bugs are expected in this release; I'll fix all of them soon.