Operating System muted microphone status is detected on waiting room page, but not while in the conference (wasting CPU)

What happened?

Note: I am re-filing #17282 (with newer versions) because the useless stale bot closed the ticket while I was travelling. The fact that an issue has not had a fix yet does not mean the issue does not exist.

When you mute your microphone in software at the operating system level (ex: mute it in GNOME Shell / GNOME Settings), and try to enter a Jitsi room, on the Electron app or Chromium you get this nice little warning that the microphone is muted outside of the browser (even if the browser itself has authorized microphone permissions for the Jitsi website and Jitsi itself is unmuted), with the white message there:

However, this message does not appear when you are inside the conferencing room, so there is no visual reminder indication that you may have muted your system microphone (I have it bound to a global keyboard shortcut) at runtime.

Another side-effect of not detecting that during a meeting is that Jitsi keeps wasting CPU processing audio even if the OS' microphone is muted (and therefore it's processing silence), as long as Jitsi's microphone toggle button is not set to muted. In my case, I have noticed a significant difference in CPU usage between Jitsi's muted (3.5% CPU usage) and unmuted (9% CPU usage) button state, so it would be much nicer if it could also save power when the browser tells it that the microphone is muted at the operating system level, i.e. not processing silent audio.

Platform

• Chrome (or Chromium based)
• Firefox
• Safari
• Other desktop browser
• Android browser
• iOS browser
• Electron app
• Android mobile app
• iOS mobile app
• Custom app using a mobile SDK

Browser / app / sdk version

Chromium 152.0.7977.82 / Firefox 155

Relevant log output

Reproducibility

• The problem is reproducible on meet.jit.si

More details?

I am running GNOME 50.4's Wayland session on Fedora 44. This happens with any GPU/hardware (whether all Intel graphics/chipsets, or open source AMD GPU graphics)