Unexpected Commanders Act pause / play transitions when playback starts?

[defagos]

@GoetzMar reported unexpected pause / play transitions at playback starts observed when playing The Written Face in Play Suisse.

Events are not displayed in order here, please check the complete log for more information.

People conjecture this might be related to initial content buffering.

Issue type

Incorrect behavior

Environment information

As extracted from the logs:

• Library version: 9.0.0
• iOS / tvOS version: 16.3
• Device: iPhone 13

Reproducibility

Difficult to reproduce

[defagos]

Analysis

No major change has been made to SRG Analytics recently, but looking at the source code for version 9.0.0 we can say that this cannot related to buffering:

• The SRGMediaPlayerPlaybackStateStalled is simply ignored. It can never lead to additional play / pause transitions.
• Events are emitted when precise allowed state transitions happen. With the log we have the additional events must be related to changes betweeen SRGMediaPlayerPlaybackStatePlaying and SRGMediaPlayerPlaybackStatePaused.
• At the SRG Media Player level such playback state changes occur when the player rate is set to zero / a positive value. Rate changes might be the result of a call to a pause method or because the system, for some reason, alters the rate. Usually this should not happen during playback, except if the app is backgrounded or if another app steals the audio focus.

Next steps

To understand where the additional pause comes from we have to understand why playback is briefly paused which, without additional context, cannot be reproduced. Having tested the affected Play Suisse stream we namely cannot see anything special and the code itself is clear.

We need a precise use case if we want to further investigate the call stack leading to the additional pause. In the meantime the reported additional pause / play transition does not produce incorrect results. Moreover ,if the issue is rare (and it is likely the case since this is the first time we hear about this issue), it should also not raise tracking costs too much, but we have not been provided with numbers which would let us evaluate how many times this happens in practice.

[GoetzMar]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that most likely it won't be to big of a case since this is the first time I found it and I already tested a lot of apps with media events. But this behavior happened on multiple videos when I tested it and on the one example that got tested by the Mapp consultant.

What would be the best way to provide you the information needed to reproduce it? Maybe a quick call on Friday helps, so I could show you the case live?

[defagos]

Sure, we would be really interested in seeing the case live, this would make it possible to reproduce the exact same scenario on our end and check the result. I see two possible outcomes:

• We can reproduce the issue in our demo app, then we can directly investigate.
• Otherwise this points at a possible behavior associated with Play Suisse implementation, in which case we can try looking into their source code to understand what could cause it.

We are available on Friday (before 11 AM or after 2 PM if possible), just send us an invitation and we will be there.

[defagos]

We could easily reproduce the issue with Play Suisse 1.0.108. Using the exact same stream URL with our analytics demo does not lead to any issue, though.

The issue is likely in the React Native Letterbox plugin. We probably should check with the Play Suisse team to debug it.

[defagos]

Discussed with @leonchabbey and @illiecemessaoudi from Play Suisse. They are pretty sure the issue is on their side. We close this issue on our side and will of course reopen it if needed.

[GoetzMar]

Sounds good to me. Thanks for clarifying where the issue lies and forwarding it to the respective team.