[pulseaudio-discuss] [RFC] Per-client flat-volumes control

[Arun Raghavan]

Hi folks,
Alexander's already brought up the issue of websites that can set the volume on
a stream programmatically, and either unwittingly or malicious set the system
volume to 100% when using flat-volumes, and while I've been against having to
deal with this on the PulseAudio side, I think we will have to after all.

The practical part of this problem really is websites that set the stream
volume to 1.0 as intialisation. There's nothing in the HTML5 spec that mandates
this, but that doesn't seem to be stopping people from doing this. The Firefox
folks, who are trying to use PA stream volumes are now also hitting this.

I like how flat-volumes work on the desktop (and I know this is not a unanimous
view), but pragmatically, for the website case, there does not seem to be a way
to make this work. As a compromise, I propose a mechanism to allow streams to
disable flat volumes for themselves. I'm attaching a patch that does this
(which needs more thorough review by myself as well).

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Arun