So I wrote a script that launches a headless Chrome instance that joins a 100ms video room as a "bot user", streams a provided media file (video + audio) as if it were a real webcam/microphone. It uses ffmpeg + ffprobe to scale the video to a max dimension, normalize FPS, and convert to:
.y4m (video for Chrome fake camera)
.wav (audio for fake mic)
You can see a test 45 min podcast with these bots on our staging server:
https://staging-fe.taout.tv/view-podcast/9b106d39-3c78-415a-...
This has been a game changer for our internal testing. Now the bots take care of the two hosts and our team can join the room as viewers which has all sorts of other features to test.
You are welcome to try out the real site too. Prod is: