Airplay with Playlist didn't work on iOS

Hello,

I have been experiencing a problem with Playlist while streaming to an AirPlay-compatible device. In my case, it was Apple TV device.

I discover that after it’s connected with AirPlay device it doesn’t work. It only works on the last source inside Playlist.

I appreciate any help or suggestions that you can offer. Thank you.

Hi @chheangly.prum,

Thank you for your report. I was quickly testing this with our internal samples and I was not able to observe any issues.

Could you maybe share your Player setup (including the PlayerConfig and, if possible, the Sources)?

Hello @davidsteinacher, Thanks for your reply.
After I tested with the sample code again.

Here are the results:

  • Playlist works as expected on Samsung Smart TV Series 7 (43) with build-in’s AirPlay capabilities. AirPlay version is 17.24.6
  • Playlist is not working on Apple TV 4K (1st generation) tvOS version is 17.1

Hi, does anyone have been able to reproduce this issue?

I had another look at it and was able to observe some issues with some streams (some were working fine). What I observed was mainly connection issues. Playback on the receiver would not start and only showed a red :no_entry_sign: on the bottom left.

Can you confirm that this is the same issue you are observing?

Playing the same stream without a playlist worked for me

Hello @davidsteinacher. Yes, I can confirm, This is the same issue we’re facing.

Hi,
Has this issue been logged or prioritized in the Bitmovin Player iOS SDK roadmap for a potential fix later on?

We had a deeper look at this issue and identified an underlying iOS/tvOS bug as this is also reproducible with a vanilla AVQueuePlayer sample application. As soon as we use an AVQeueuPlayer with multiple AVURLAssets, which have an AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate associated, playback on the receiver will fail (never start or start on the wrong AVURLAsset). Using just one AVURLAsset works fine.

We logged a feedback with Apple (FB13511509). To get some traction on this report, you could open a feedback using Apples Feedback Assistant yourself referencing our Feedback number.

We found a lot of other posts online reporting issues with AirPlay in general since tvOS 17, so we are cautiously optimistic Apple will address this sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, there would be two ways forward:

Hi @davidsteinacher
I have a question on behalf of a customer. You mentioned setting isCustomHlsLoadingEnabled to false comes with some drawbacks. Aside from DownloadFinishedEvents stated in the documentation, what other potential drawbacks/side effects could there be?

And apart from not being able to use isNativeHlsParsingEnabled

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No DownloadFinishedEvents are the immediate impact of setting isCustomHlsLoadingEnabled to false. Furthermore, all parsing related features can not be enabled as setting isNativeHlsParsingEnabled to true will not have any effect. Which features those are can be seen in the linked documentation.

Other than that there should not be and drawbacks/side effects.


For the record. I just tested this again with tvOS 17.4 and the issue is still persistent.

Thanks @davidsteinacher for the clarification!
Then we see no relevant side effects to use it.