Is it possible to do Airplay audio streaming like Spotify or Amazon Music. When i setup an Airplay stream with Audio from my App the screen (on the Apple-TV) turns black and shows only the progressbar.
Is it possible to show the small hint in the top corner with all the audio information which disappears after a few Seconds and don't block the whole Apple TV Ui?
Or is this kind of a Spotify / Amazon Music privilege?
We had this problem as well. I believe that there are some bugs here in Apple's court, but we found a decent workaround that seems to be pretty safe from side effects.
We found that setting the player's allowsExternalPlayback field to NO would sometimes correctly stream the audio without the blank video screen (along with correct display of the now playing information, correct response to volume rocker etc...). However, we found that very often it would fail to play anything at all.
Doing some runtime introspection, we found that the player would always correctly buffer from the network. But when it would hit the isPlaybackLikelyToKeepUp event, it would set the player's rate field to 1 indicating that it is playing, but more often than not, not actually play the audio. No errors were reported and so from all we could tell, the player itself thinks that it is indeed playing when it is not. We found this hangup to only occur when we had set an AirPlay device for audio output.
So we found that in certain event callbacks and other key places, if we added a simple one-liner:
if( self.avPlayer.rate == 1 ){ self.avPlayer.rate = 1; }
It would kick whatever internal hold ups were causing the player to not actually AirPlay and correctly stream the audio. If the player was already correctly playing, then no harm done.
Related
I would like to reduce the bandwidth my app consumes when the user plays a video and goes into background mode (using a HLS stream). I want the audio to still play but it seems like the AVPlayer keeps downloading the video segments even though they should not be needed (user can't see anything anyway).
Theoretically, I could have a video with a very low bitrate (such as a black screen) and set player.currentItem.preferredPeakBitRate = 1 when the app enters background mode, but then I don't know how to prevent the app from downloading a huge number of black video segments in background, so that when the user returns, he/she gets a black screen for a long time. Also, it is unclear how I can prevent the black screen from showing in foreground mode if the user has a bad connection?
I have also tried to disable the video through the AVURLAsset's - (AVMediaSelectionGroup *)mediaSelectionGroupForMediaCharacteristic:(NSString *)mediaCharacteristic. I could do this for audio, but not for video, since the method returns nil for the parameter AVMediaCharacteristicVisual. Is it something I can change in my HLS manifest to enable this?
The best way to handle this is to use an incoming audio profile through the manifest and not doing much for this on the client end. This is because the audio only profile will have comparatively lower bitrate than to audio+video profiles and if you put the condition to check - if indicatedbitrate less than the minimum audio+video profile the manifest has, it will automatically switch to the audio profile when it requires.
You would also need to add the observer for AVPlayerItemNewAccessLogEntry.
The rel parameter in YouTube API dictates whether or not related videos are shown at the end. When rel=0 the video reverts back to the thumbnail with a play button.
However on mobile (tested on iPhone / iPad / Fire Tablet) when the video goes back to the thumbnail it cannot be played a second time. It just does nothing.
I reported the issue to Google but nothing yet after a few days.
I had to resort to destroying the video and recreating it but this makes for a kind of nasty flickering.
My experience with YouTube issues is they never seem to end up fixing anything related to iOS - so I was wondering if there was any other kind of trick to prevent this.
Test page
The trouble with refreshing a webpage at a specific interval is that you dont know exactly when the video ends so you need to develop a method which the video player sends a signal when the video ends, which would then start the script to refresh the page. Otherwise you end up restarting it in the middle of the video. so personally, I would not even mess with refreshing the page. For Audio players it works ok because audio is smaller and streams more quicker. Video dont.... they always stop to buffer.
So YouTube API uses "Events" and "Listeners", so in particular, you need to design around the Event: "onStateChange".
When onStateChange = "ended" (zero) the video has ended, so then you reload the video player with the same video and set it to its Ready State again.
In theory its very easy you basically need to setup and control the entire video player through javascript. And the API gives examples on that.
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/js_api_reference.html
http://grizzlyweb.com/webmaster/javascripts/refresh.asp
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/forum/
Have a look at loop and playlist parameters as well. You can set playlist parameter to video ID and same video can be replayed using this.
So, it will be something like:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/{VIDEO_ID}?wmode=opaque&loop=1&version=3&playlist={VIDEO_ID}
Hope this helps!
Appears to have been fixed by YouTube.
I can now play the video multiple times (on multiple devices) without it getting stuck. Was too busy wondering why my question was getting so little attention that I forgot to check again to see if it was fixed ;-)
I have an app that uses AVPlayer (or AVQueuePLayer) to play local files that were recorded by the App. All works great. But I also want this to work on iPhone when a call is in progress (the videos are event recordings). What I found is that during a phone call, the video feed to avplayerLayer goes blank, AVPlayer rate change to 0 (STOP), and all attempts to change rate to non-zero (PLAY) are ignored (rate stays at 0). There does not appear to be any documentation on this, and the only way to detect this condition in the player, is that player is STOPPED and will not start PLAYBACK. Of course, I also check for audio interruptions, and call center calls in progress.
Obviously, in this case the interruption is caused by a call, so there is always a inactive/resume or a intactive/background/foreground/resume transition. As well as audio route notification, audio interruption. So indirectly I know the condition is probably occurring.
So questions are:
(1) Is there any direct method (specific to AVPlayer,AVPlayerLayer) to be notified that AVPlayer is in this non-playing mode. I now use "avplayer.rate failed to change rate from 0 to non-zero", but this seems hacky (and too much "crossing the streams"!) I want to Notify user that video temporarily can not be played or previewed, so they do not think the App is broken. And also inform them or automatically continue Playback when iPhone call ends. (Without a looping process that keeps trying to start playback every 500ms!)
(2) Can AVPlayer play anything while a iPhone call (Green Bar) is in progress? or is this just the way apple designed the AVPlayer SDK? (If so there is no documentation on this) Obviously, other apps can play video during an iPhone call, but I suspect they are using a lower level SDK and not AVPlayer.
I have a video composition which I'd like to play over Airplay (without mirroring). The app works as expected when using normal Airplay mirroring, but I'd like to get the speed, reliability, and resolution bump you get from using Airplay video instead.
The problem is that when I set
player.usesAirPlayVideoWhileAirPlayScreenIsActive = YES;
...the player goes blank.
Notes:
Since I don't create separate windows for each display, they are both trying to use the same AVPlayer.
My AVVideoComposition contains different files and adds opacity ramps between them.
This unanswered question suggests that the problem is more likely due to the fact that I'm playing an AVComposition than the use of a shared player: AVComposition doesn't play via Airplay Video
Two questions:
Do I have to get rid of the player on the iPad?
Can an AVVideoComposition ever be played over AirPlay?
I can't make comments so I had to post this as an answer although it might not fully respond to the questions.
I had similar issue and at the end I found out that when AVPlayer plays AVComposition it simply doesn't display anything on the external display. That's why I had to do it myself by listening to UIScreen connection notifications.
I have to say that all worked pretty perfect. I'm checking first if there are more than one screen and if there are I simply move the AVPlayer on that screen while displaying a simple message on the device's screen that content is played on... plus the name of AirPlay device. This way I can put whatever I want on the external display and is not very complicated. Same thing is when I receive UIScreenDidConnectNotification.
That was fine until I noticed that the composition plays really choppy on the the external display. Even if it consists of only one video without any complex edits or overlays. Same video plays perfectly if I save it to the Camera Roll or if I use MPMoviePlayerController.
I've tried many things like lowering resolutions, lowering renderScale and so on but with no success.
One thing bothers me more is how actually Apple do this in iMovie - if you have AirPlay enabled and you play a project (note it's still not rendered so it must use a composition in order to display it) right after tapping play button it opens a player that plays content really smoothly on the external monitor. If you however activate AirPlay from the player it closes and start rendering the project. After that it plays it I thing by using MPMoviePlayerController.
I'm still trying to find a solution and will post back if I have any success.
So for the two questions:
I don't see why you have to get rid.
Yes it can be played but with different technique and obviously issues.
in the app .plist create a new item called:
required background modes
add a new array element called:
App plays audio or streams audio/video using AirPlay
Not sure if you have already tried this, but you don't mention it in your post.
Cheers!
I am developing an iPhone application in which I play a video using MPMoviePlayerController. I use custom controls to play the video.
I have a slider that shows video time line. Using this user can seek the movie to any time-line of the movie.
When user continuously moves the slider:
Pause the video only for first time; [MPMoviePlayerController-obj pause]
MPMoviePlayerController-obj.currentPlaybackTime = slider.value
When slider action ends:
Play the video; [MPMoviePlayerController-obj play]
This plays the movie from the position where user had left the slider. But, it leads to blank frame when movie completes playing. This defect occurs randomly; i.e not for all the seek'd time.
What is the reason for getting the blank frame? How do I solve this?
I'm not sure if this will work, but try setting the initialPlaybackTime to either the slider.value or to currentPlaybackTime.
For being sure that your content is not flawed, hence possibly triggering that issue, you should try to replicate your faulty MPMoviePlayerController results using Apple's reference video content.
HTTP-Streaming: bipbop.m3u8
Progressive Download & Local
Playback: sample_mpeg4.mp4
I have personally observed many issues in connection with improper encoding. Weird things tend to happen when working with lossy compressed content. This is true for video (i-frames vs. p-frames) as well as audio (variable bitrate).
One being improper playback durations being reported. Such issue may result into an unexpected finished-state. I have seen cases where MPMoviePlayerController still shows a bunch of seconds to play even though the actual video has obviously finished. Those cases occur frequently once the user seeks around within the video.
Once you made sure that the issue occurs using the given sample files as well, you should file a bug-report.