Make OTPublisher usable as a preview component.

[Pyroboomka]

Feature request

Make OTPublisher usable as a preview component.

Description
Basically, I have this call flow:
User enters a "preparation" room, where he can grant permissions for audio/video, make sure that his camera works okay and so on. After doing that, he taps the "Start call" button, gets session_id/token from backend and joins the real call, ready to subscribe to other people streams and publish his own feed.

The problem is OTPublisher is currently unusable without session_id/token, which seems fair.
It is possible to mock preview screen with RNCamera, but when tapping the "Start call" button, which mounts OTSession/OTSubscriber/OTPublisher components, screen goes black for some time until (I guess) OTPublisher is successfully initialized and succeeds in publishing own video.

In web version we are using opentok-accelerator-core, where it is possible to create own video element and make transition seamless with

otCore.startCall({
        publishVideo: true,
        publishAudio: true,
        audioSource: localStreams.audio,
        videoSource: localStreams.video,
      });

It also seems (at least by the docs) opentok-accelerator-core-android has similar feature already implemented, but I'm not sure if this preview component is, again, usable without session_id/token configured.

Proposal
I see this feature as a prop in publisherOptions, something like a boolean flag

      ...
      audioFallbackEnabled: true,
      audioBitrate: 40000,
      frameRate: 30,
      publishStreams: true|false

which makes OTPublisher work without session_id/token, and later when prop is toggled and session_id/token is provided, it hooks up and starts acting as a correctly initialized OTPublisher.

I checked the source code, and without native experience, this feature seems quite daunting (well, not flipping some boolean flags lol)

Thats for joining my ted talk

Links / references
https://github.com/opentok/accelerator-core-android
https://github.com/opentok/accelerator-core-js

[msach22]

Thanks for filing the detailed issue @Pyroboomka. Unfortunately, this is a current limitation of the library. Please note that this library is not officially supported so it's on a best effort basis. We'll see if we can refactor the library to allow for this feature.

[kuasha420]

This will be a very useful feature. Please consider it .

[Panda-ref]

Few years later this library is now officially supported. Could perhaps this be prioritised?