Screen sharing is sometimes automatically turned off to save bandwidth

What happened?

During a Jitsi Meet conference, when another participant is sharing their screen, the shared screen sometimes suddenly disappears.

Jitsi then displays a message similar to:

“Video for [participant]'s screen has been turned off to save bandwidth.”

This problem occurs intermittently. It does not happen every time, but it has happened multiple times during meetings.

The main problem is that the stream being disabled is the active screen share, not just a participant's camera video.

When someone is presenting important content, automatically hiding the shared screen makes it impossible for other participants to follow the presentation.

Steps to reproduce:

Join a Jitsi Meet conference with multiple participants.

One participant starts sharing their screen.

Other participants watch the shared screen normally.

After some time, the screen share may suddenly disappear.

Jitsi displays the message:

“Video for [participant]'s screen has been turned off to save bandwidth.”

Expected behavior:

The active screen share should have higher priority than normal participant camera streams.

If bandwidth becomes limited, Jitsi should preferably:

reduce the resolution or frame rate of participant cameras first;

disable non-essential camera streams first;

reduce the quality or frame rate of the screen share if necessary;

instead of completely disabling the active screen share.

It would also be helpful if users could manually choose to continue receiving the shared screen.

Actual behavior:

Jitsi automatically stops displaying the active screen share and shows the message that the video has been turned off to save bandwidth.

This causes participants to miss important presentation content.

Frequency:

Intermittent, but it has occurred multiple times during normal meetings.

Related issue:

A similar issue was previously reported here:

#13212 — Screensharing and saving bandwidth

The previous issue appears to be closed, but the same or very similar behavior is still occurring.

Please investigate whether active desktop sharing can be given higher priority when bandwidth-saving mechanisms are triggered.

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

153.0.8010.37

Relevant log output

Reproducibility

• The problem is reproducible on meet.jit.si

More details?

I didn't set up my own server; I'm using the official one.