Youtube like video track selection

[sridhard]

1. Loaded event will give the information about available video tracks
2. selectedVideoTrack prop will give the interface to select the video track. This prop will take the height of the video (Similar to youtube like 144p, 350p etc) and set the video track. If height is 0 then all video tracks will be added to list so that it will work like 'Auto' in youtube

[cobarx]

Looks very nice and well implemented, this will be great to have!

Would you mind adding docs to the README for track selection and the onBandwidthUpdate event. Also, do you have a video stream that I can use to test this? I'm not sure I have any samples that have multiple resolutions.

Thanks!

[MarianBe]

this is only for android, right? do you plan on adding iOS support?

[sridhard]

@cobarx @padampadam I am working on IOS next week. Once IOS work is completed I will update documentation
@cobarx here is one sample of multiple resolutions https://bitdash-a.akamaihd.net/content/MI201109210084_1/m3u8s/f08e80da-bf1d-4e3d-8899-f0f6155f6efa.m3u8

[cobarx]

@sridhard Sounds good, looking forward to all these improvements!

[RohitRox]

Great Work 👍

[MarianBe]

can anybody fill me in on the current state of this PR? was really looking forward to this feature

[sridhard]

@padampadam @cobarx I have finished this feature for Android. For IOS there is no option of track selection.

Android: Bandwidth reporting, video track information reporting and video track selection
IOS: Bandwidth reporting

Can you please merge this to main branch

[cobarx]

Hi @sridhard, this very very cool! Congrats on getting this working on both platforms. Can you update the README with all the appropriate API info and then I will take a look shortly.

[cobarx]

Please change this to onVideoBandwidthUpdate. The outward facing prop can still be called onBandwidthUpdate. Event names are global across the app, so if another module (e.g. audio) also declares onBandwidthUpdate, it will conflict.

You can copy the pattern for other events such as onVideoProgress -> onProgress

[sridhard]

@cobarx I have fixed your comments and also done some code clean up

[cobarx]

This is very exciting and I'm looking forward to reviewing the latest changes.

For other people to get to use this, it's very important we give them documentation so they know the feature exists and how it works. Before I can accept this PR, we need to get it documented.

[cobarx]

Can you get the README updated so I can test & merge this?

[cobarx]

@sridhard Still need the documentation to be able to test and merge this. Any chance you can get that drafted up?

[amismailz]

Hope we hear good news about this PR soon, regards 👍

[cobarx]

I have made some tweaks to this. It made sense to have an auto option & refer to it as resolution. I've also noted in the docs that you can pick the track using the index type. For the bandwidth rates, I've removed all formatting and the event now reports the bandwidth as the number of bits. This is in line with what the players & the HTML video player report (which is the gold standard). Developers can reformat this value if they want a different representation. The audio bitrate did not work for any videos I tested, so I have removed that until we figure out how to make it work.

@sridhard I've also gone ahead and documented how this functionality works in the README. I appreciate that you have put a lot of work into this. It has been very frustrating that you have not responded to multiple requests to update the docs. Let me be clear, in the future I will immediately close any future PRs you submit if not accompanied by an update to the docs.

[am33t]

@cobarx, is there any work around for "track selection" functionality on iOS?

[MBakhtiyor]

@cobarx @padampadam I am working on IOS next week. Once IOS work is completed I will update documentation
@cobarx here is one sample of multiple resolutions https://bitdash-a.akamaihd.net/content/MI201109210084_1/m3u8s/f08e80da-bf1d-4e3d-8899-f0f6155f6efa.m3u8

Hi. Thank you for Android version. Is iOS version is ready too?

[flexgrip]

So it seems on iOS we can only use maxBitRate, but on android, we can use selectedVideoTrack. However, you have to know the tracks in advance because in 4.4.4 and 5.0.0 I can't seem to get it to give me the track index or names of each hls rendition.

[learnyst]

on IOS we cannot support track selection because IOS player doesnot expose this capability. In android we can select the video track.

[sharifhh]

How can I add custom quality selection for iOS, is that even possible?

[flexgrip]

@sharifhh I did it by just binding an action sheet to the maxBitRate prop. It’s super easy. But I could only use v4.4.4.

One thing to note, when you are testing, you have to wait a few seconds to skip ahead to see the change. So if you are seeing the HD version of the video and set the max bitrate to a lower version, it continues playing what it has in its buffer and then will start loading the lower quality.

Also your bit rate has to be known. If you have a 500000 bit stream and set it to 499999, it will just stay on “Auto”. It won’t just choose the closest one. So I think my lowest was 379000 bits. So I set my control in my maxBitRate prop to 400000 to get it to work.

[flexgrip]

I should also note that on android I was able to just get the track index and my selection options are read from those. But on v5, the method that returns the hls video tracks didn’t give me anything.