Live button only shows after 30 seconds of pause

[defagos]

Issue opened by @vpdn on Play SRG (https://github.com/SRGSSR/playsrg-ios/issues/107).

Issue overview

When a user pauses while watching a live stream (e.g. game), the live button does not appear right away, but only after a delay of around 30seconds. Expected would be that the live button always appears, as soon as the user is not live anymore.

• [X] Incorrect behavior
• [ ] Feature request
• [ ] Crash
• [ ] Help / documentation
• [ ] Other: classification

Environment information

• Application version: Letterbox 1.6.3
• iOS version: 11
• Device: iPhone 6

Reproducibility

• [X] Always reproducible
• [ ] Difficult to reproduce

[defagos]

This is expected behavior.

A stream is played as chunks are retrieved. Chunks have a length (for our streams, usually 6 seconds). If you display the live button if < 6 seconds from the live, then the button will flicker as chunks are retrieved from the playlist.

We chose 30 seconds to be the default threshold under which a stream is considered to be live. This does not match the reality, of course, but this is also what Apple does with their own player.

On SRG MediaPlayer controller, we have a corresponding property (liveTolerance) to change this threshold. We haven't exposed it in Letterbox, but we could. This way you would be able to lower it (I don't recommend going under 10 seconds, though).

[vpdn]

I could imagine that 30s is a rather long time and might really confuse users. But those might just scrub to the end themselves, in which case the stream also goes back to live I assume. I wouldn't expose another property to letterbox. If you determine 30s to be the best value, I don't see how it helps if other apps would use another value. There's nothing inherently different what we play contentwise that would suggest a deviation from the "norm".

If I understand correctly, the logic is to show the live button, when the user is 30s away from the end of the last chunk. Would it maybe make sense to always show the live button, if it's a live stream? (i.e. remove the hide logic altogether). Pressing live while already live would just be a noop then.

[defagos]

Yes, maybe we could display the live button in all cases. Problem is, we also display Live within the slider pop-up, so it might be confusing for the user to be able to go back to the live when we are already live. But maybe this is still the right way to go.

We'll discuss it within the team, thanks for the input.

[defagos]

I propose we discuss this UI topic as part of our version 1.8.0 design revamp.

[defagos]

This is desired behavior.