FOMS Notes

Casting/PiP Session

  • A lot of discussion about splitting PiP and casting

Casting

  • Casting falls into 2 buckets
  • features that exist on the web today
  • casting SDK that player developers are familiar with today
  • Mark’s team provides the functionality under the sender side, as well as the remote playback API
  • OpenScreen™ (?)
  • chrome → chromecast
  • opening up functionality for the presentation API
  • Cory (Bitmovin) - Are we going to be able to use custom players in receiver applications?
  • Documentation appears to state that Shaka is the only player allowed This is not the case.
  • Ideally that runtime would have full MSE
  • Nothing specific, but have had issues getting things to play back “correctly” and debugging is difficult.
  • For example: cast messages have a size limit, and messages are silently swallowed if they’re over that size. 
  • 5kb seems to be the safe limit (admittedly based on testing from December 2017 so this might be an out-of-date complaint)
  • Supposed to be 64kb apparently
  • new protocol fixes that
  • seeking event will be fired a little after it starts seeking and similar issues
  • weak hardware
  • media capabilities or poor performance?
  • both, but mostly media capabilities
  • Persistent chromecast dashboard issues
  • Want the ability to be able to cast a “default”
  • Also want to be able to have the Chromecast turn off off so it doesn’t turn the tv on when it automatically updates
  • AirPlay? Presentation API? Cross-platform consistency in general.
  • New API will have a second mode to be able to do a content overlay
  • Making a library that mobile apps can use to stream content to an OpenScreen-compatible screen or device.
  • Interest in making a Web API that would allow for just sending a portion of the screen?
  • Two modes for OpenScreen
  • One mode where you describe the content
  • Another mode where you essentially just send encoded frames
  • first concentrating on the transport portion
  • based on feedback, may look at “next steps”
  • Second-screen experience
  • If someone is casting, being able to put things back on the sender device (ad experience, etc)
  • What do you see happening from the user experience?
  • If there’s an ad, being able to show details back on the user’s phone (product details)
  • movie or show metadata
  • You can basically do it today via custom message channel, but should it be part of the spec?
  • Painful experience around video debugging around media capabilities
  • Make it easier to discover the chromecast via the inspect menu (often need to restart Chrome or the computer to be able to find it)
  • Scrubbing with live DVR breaks the media session
  • you can cast additional pieces of media, etc, but volume, scrubbing, etc will no longer work
  • Improved ergonomics around Chromecast dev tools
  • Want to be able to simply pause content while playing an ad
  • currently have to pause and change source, then swap the source back and seek to where the content was before the ad.