Unable to join audio/video call on some Android devices (Web SDK)

Affects

Dolby Product(s)

• Web SDK

Third Party Product(s)

• Android devices from different vendors

Description

Unable to join a conference when using Javascript SDK either with audio only, or video on some specific Android devices. The issue happens every time with typical error as shown below. 

RemoteDescriptionError - Failed to execute 'setRemoteDescription' on 'RTCPeerConnection': Failed to set remote offer sdp: Failed to set remote video description send parameters for m-section with mid='video'

This exception indicates that the device does not have the right video codec support for encoding/decoding. Not all Android devices have H.264 licensing and hence are unable to use H.264 codec when specified in your app. This is quite common in Android devices due to the nature of the fragmented Android ecosystem. This issue will happen on any unsupported Android device joining a conference using the H.264 codec.

All of the SDKs use H.264 as the default codec during conference creation. This issue will happen even if your app is using audio only. 

Reproduction Steps

1. Build and run Javascript SDK sample app on the Android device on a mobile browser;
2. Try to create and join a conference from this Android device;
3. Unable to join the call and following error is generated:

RemoteDescriptionError - Failed to execute 'setRemoteDescription' on 'RTCPeerConnection': Failed to set remote offer sdp: Failed to set remote video description send parameters for m-section with mid='video'

Workaround(s)

• Explicitly specifying the video codec to VP8 when creating the conference will avoid this issue. Please refer to to this article to specify the video codec. 

Action Plan

• None. This issue is due to specific Android devices not supporting H264, which is not in our scope to control.

Ticket References

Third Party Reference

• N/A

Dolby Reference

• N/A