Change audiotrack in multilanguage video on Chromecast

Hi Gus,

Thank you for reporting the issue.

We tested the Chromecast with your stream in the latest version of Chrome – 87.0.4280.141 on Android 10, and we were able to reproduce the issue. The subtitles were synchronized with the video which played on the source device, but they didn’t show up on the screen to which the video was casted.

Could you please let us know on which device and browser you have experienced the issue? I’ll forward it to our development team to see what we can do about it.

Thanks,
Chiara

Hello Gus,

I see the LoadRequest has a a way of obtianing the activeTrackIds: https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/reference/chrome/chrome.cast.media.LoadRequest#activeTrackIds So I would guess there is indeed a way of switching from one audio track to another.

I was able to find some code examples for subtitles, although these are 3-4 years old. But this bit of code looks good: https://gist.github.com/guerrerocarlos/3aca64069853d8d24a83b481246f23ca#file-chromecast_with_subtitles-html-L45-L57

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Gus,

I should be able to improve the FV Player Chromecast code next week.

What always puts me off when working with Chromecast is that there are some HLS streams which fail to cast with it for no apparent reason. For example https://playertest.longtailvideo.com/adaptive/bipbop/bipbop.m3u8 won’t work even when using JW Player: https://foliovision.com/support/fv-wordpress-flowplayer/bug-reports/detailederrorcode-315-on-casting-to-chromecast#post-126516

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Gus,

please post a link to your website where we can see that video playing.

Do you get the Chromecast icon on https://foliovision.com ?

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Gus,

FV Player 7.4.39.727 is out and it brings following improvements to Chromecast integration:

• Chromecast – retain playback position when enabling/disabling
• Chromecast – support replaying the video and playlists
• Chromecast – support switching of audio tracks in multiple audio track HLS streams

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Gus,

what Cloudfront settings did you change? Did you only disable the requirement of signed URLs and that was it? Could you please post the link to your test page?

Signed URLs should not stop Chromecast from working, but I see it could run into issues is the URL signature times out. I will test that out and feed the new URL with new singature into Chromecast when necessary. I hope it works, it’s getting quite complex that way.

We also need to handle subtitles.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Gus,

I’m running into the same issue on https://foliovision.com/player/demos/hls-stream – if the CDN hosting the HLS stream is set to require the URL tokens, then we serve the stream through our Stream Loader component of FV Player.

And unfortunately it seems like Chromecast doesn’t like it. It seems that it has a problem with the absolute paths in HLS m3u8 files. If that’s true then it’s a problem as we won’t be able to support playback of these HLS streams with URL token on Chromecast unless the CDN supports it natively (generate m3u8 files with URL tokens for video segment files).

I will test some other stream with the absolute URLs as I haven’t found any documentation regarding this.

Thanks,
Martin

Hello Gus,

making the video available for Chromecast does decrese its security. For the Signed URLs it requires these URLs to last for longer.

FV Player Pro encrypred videos currently do not play in Chromecast. We could add support, but it would open another channel for the decryption key.

I was trying to figure out why Stream Loader won’t work with Chromecast. I do not have the solution yet, but at least I was able to verify that the absolute segment URLs and query strings are not the issue.

Thanks,
Martin