According to the Release Notes (of July 8), the docs for the Sender and the updated answer of this question, the Styled Media Receiver of Google Cast does now support Closed Captioning or Subtitle tracks.
However, when I tell the Default or the Styled Media Receiver to show a text track, nothing happens. It does not even load the .vtt from the server, as I can see in the logs.
I can tell the receiver app got the text tracks just fine, but even using the Android example app, the subtitles never show up. According to all the logs, they are being sent and the receiver app is told to show them - but they never appear, they are never even loaded.
The MediaTrack is being created as follows:
new MediaTrack.Builder(2, MediaTrack.TYPE_TEXT)
.setName("Deutsch")
.setSubtype(MediaTrack.SUBTYPE_CAPTIONS)
.setContentId("https://example.com/video/caption_de.vtt")
.setContentType("text/vtt")
.setLanguage("de").build();
I have checked thrice that the file exists and is being loaded with the type text/vtt. But that does not matter, as the file is never even requested by the player. I have tried both MediaTrack.SUBTYPE_CAPTIONS and MediaTrack.SUBTYPE_SUBTITLES.
So I need to know, is this claimed support of CC in the Styled Media Receiver simply a lie? Or is there some undocumented trick required to make it possible?
If there is still a custom receiver required, I would like to know how to convert the example player to support subtitles, as it doesn't seem to support them either.
First, I suggest you change your wording in future posts (re: "..is simply a lie.."); that is not appropriate at all. Secondly, it works and you can test that with the CastVideos-android app (or ios variation of it for that matter); the first three videos have CC. Lastly, we have documentation on that subject on our documentation site (https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/android_sender, under "Using the Tracks API").
Related
I have a popular read aloud app, that is also often used by visually impaired and blind people. Some, very few of them complain that when using the app or having it read aloud, it repeatedly says "Service at Voice" (my app's name is #Voice Aloud Reader). I tested this on several phones with different versions of Android and TalkBack enabled, but couldn't reproduce this problem.
The app is showing a notification with reading progress and buttons to pause/resume, FF and reverse etc. Of course all the reading aloud is done from a service, not activity, because a user may want to close my activity, or even turn off screen, and still listen. I would gladly post more technical details, but don't know which ones are relevant.
I tried searching for any combination of terms "TalkBack saying 'service' repeatedly", but cannot find anything relevant. My users who contacted me about this could not find either any setting in TalkBack app to make it stop saying this. Could anyone shed some light on this issue?
I found the reason for my problem, part of it was my own app code, and part just confusing behavior of Android system and TalkBack on different devices. Here is what was happening:
The app, #Voice Aloud Reader, reads text loaded into it (web pages, docs, books) and highlights the sentence it reads aloud. On each change of sentence it updates progress, both on its own screen if visible, and in the notification. The notification update code is pretty old, from Android 4 days. I did not know then how to update the content of notification, it seemed to me that the only way to update it, after using NotificationBuilder to update content, was to call in my service again:
startForeground(/* id: */ 1000, myNotifBuilder.build());
It worked well for years, also under TalkBack, no problems. Even today on at least 5 test devices I have with Android 5 to 9 and with emulators, TalkBack activated, it works correctly. But some users reported that upon reading each new sentence (progress update), TalkBack says "Service #Voice". I finally updated the code as follows, and my users report that the problem is solved:
if (newNotification) {
startForeground(/* id: */ 1000, myNotifBuilder.build());
}
else {
NotificationManagerCompat.from(this).notify(1000, myNotifBuilder.build());
}
I doubt that this knowledge will help many people, now notifications are documented better and there is a clear "Update notification" chapter that explains how to do this correctly in Google documents for developers.
I bet it's announcing the app name on orientation changes each time the MainActivity is created.
SO link
After finding out that the Cordova plugin I use to work with Chromecast doesn't send the MediaInfo.Metadata I provide (see How to set/change album art?), I've decided to implement it myself. But this brings me to the following question:
Can I change the album art image after I loaded the media using RemoteMediaPlayer.load()?
The thing is that I'm using the chromecast to play a radio stream, so it would be nice if I could change the 'now playing' info without reloading the entire stream. I only want to set the title and image(s).
This is, of course, possible when I build my own Custom Receiver app but I hope that the default Styled Media Receiver already provides some method for this.
I think I would need to use sendMessage(), and the Chromecast Developer site does mention sending messages and images, but it only says that 'media messages' have a predefined namespace (urn:x-cast:com.google.cast.media) and then nothing. It says images have three properties (url, width, height) but not what the syntax of the message should be.
So can anyone help me with this?
The styled or default receiver use the current media's metadata to show an album art, so you cannot change the album art without loading a new media.If you want to do that, you need to write your own custom receiver and use a custom namespace to send messages; since that will be a custom namespace, you can decide what the content for the textual payload should be; SDK doesn't enforce one vs the other.
I'm using a sample app for the RemotePlaybackClient from #commonsware to play a video from a url to Google ChromeCast dongle, the app works like a charm but I would like to implement a playlist, any idea how to send a playlist to ChromeCast from an Android device?
As usual, I don't need code, just links, tutorials, etc... Tks.
Are you using a custom receiver?
If so, you can pass a json to such receiver with your playlist and manage that list with a playback state.
you might try looking at "mediaList" object here. Thats your playlist object.
This is a totally different project (not mediaRouter api but ccl instead) that i used because i wanted to implement a playlist and wanted to NOT take on my own receiver app. I wanted to see whether the default receiver could collaborate with an existing github sender sample - altered slightly to manipulate both a playList implemented in the "mediaList" AND to send appropriate and successive PLAY instructions to the default recieiver app when that app's state as relayed in normal "consumer" message traffic indicated state=ready.
D/ccl_VideoCastManager(31057): onApplicationStatusChanged() reached: Ready To Cast
So, when the default receiver fires the "ready" message, the senderApp can just call getNext to return an entry from "mediaList" and then send a "play(mediaInfo.entry)" to the default receiver.
onApplicationStatusChanged() is the interface used by the ccl to commmunicate/ sync player state between the local/remote players. When the default-remote-state changes to "ready to cast" you can use "VideoCastManager" and its base class to select the next MediaInfo entry and format a message for the remote to play it...
this.startCastControllerActivity(this.mContext, nextMediaInfo, 0, true);
code above from sender/ccl base tells the receiver to play the item that the sender has determine is next from list.
Note : i was advised to implement the playlist on a custom receiver app that i would write. Im not that ambitious and found a very simple hack on the sender/ccl classes that was reliable enough for me.
I tried using a Android phone to cast to Chromecast device by Youtube app. I added some Videos to queue, then I used another phone to cast to Chromecast device. The second one automatically knows the videos added to queue on the first one.
I don't know how Youtube app can do this?
EDIT I guess Youtube app uses one custom data channel besides Media channel. When Video is added to queue, sender app will send somethings (eg: videoId) to receiver. Receiver will save it in array of video ID. When another phone connects to Chromecast device, It'll receiver array of video ID from the receiver. Can anyone give other solutions? Thanks
I guess what you are asking is how you can create a play list, potentially shared by multiple devices. If that is the case, you have a couple of choices:
keep the playlist in the receiver: this is the simplest option. This will be a simple array on the receiver, kept in memory, which will go away when application ends. A custom receiver is required and it can implement the methods such as "append, insert, get, clear, ... to provide what the senders need. When each sender connects, it can ask (calling 'get' for example) for the current "queue" and then can modify the queue by other methods such as 'clear', 'append', 'insert', .... Note that there is no long-term persistence on the receiver (local storage is available but will be cleared as son as the app is gone).
keep the playlist in the cloud: you need to do most of the things that you do in the previous option but you also persist the playlist to the cloud; the advantage is that playlist lasts beyond the life of a session (this may or may not be desired). In addition, sender apps can potentially get the playlist fro the cloud directly, if needed.
The important thing is that the main storage for your playlist is not your sender devices; they don't know (and shouldn't know) abut the presence of other senders in the eco-system.
On the receiver side, we recently published a simple sample that sows how the notion of (local) playlist can be implemented; that is a simplified example but is enough to show that with minimal work, you can take advantage of the Media Channel; for more sophisticated handling of a shared queue, you definitely need an out-of-bound channel/namespace to handle all the additional api's that I mentioned above.
In chromecast
i want to send different kinds of url(mp4/mp3/png..) to the receiver,but how does the receiver to show them dynamically?
this is: how does the receiver recogonize what kind of the RemoteMedia received?
In the current version of the SDK, there is nothing from the framework side to help you with that directly. You can include the mimetype in the metadata and retrieve that on your receiver and do as you see fit. That said, if your media is only audio or video, things are better since the video element can handle both and you can just treat them the same but for images, you have to do some other work. Another approach is to look at the extension and try to guess the type but that is not fully reliable.