Player keeps playing on incoming call: any advice? about cordova-plugin-exoplayer HOT 23 CLOSED

@netmikey It sounds like something that wouldn't be in the scope of the player.

What you are looking for is use/create a plugin that monitors telephony events and notifies your app of any so you can pause/resume the playback. If you don't find anything suitable and you're willing to sponsor the development of that let me know.

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Thanks for your feedback on this! 👍
After I wrote these lines, I got an even more general feedback: the player also doesn't stop playing when another app starts playing music. I'm not an Android guy, but I'm told that apps that play back sound usually stop when something else starts playing a sound too?
It seems to me like that would be the OS's job, wouldn't it? Or is there also a native API that notifies me when another app starts playing back audio?

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I'm not sure, I would have to do a bit of research. I would expect that there is an API that let's you know if another app is using audio subsystem. Or maybe there is a setting we can use to trigger the behavior we want?

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I just had a look around and found this SO question:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24474929/stop-mediaplayer-when-an-other-app-play-music

Which links to this piece of android documentation about handling audio focus: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/volume-and-earphones.html#audio-focus

I'd be interested in your thoughts: is this an exoplayer topic?

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I think we can make the plugin ask for audio focus if it helps.

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I think that would be great 👍

Let's go over what's in the docs:

• Before starting to play, request audio focus and verify that it has been granted

that one shouldn't be too much of an issue - the only decision required: what should we do if we don't get focus granted?

• When playback stops, abandon audio focus

this one's straight forward

• When another app gains audio focus, stop playing or duck the volume down

I don't know about this one. Maybe add events that applications can subscribe to in order to decide what to do? Or add a config setting like: onAudioFocusLost: [IGNORE|STOP|DUCK_VOLUME]. But then again: what should the player do when it regains audio focus? Resume playback? Nothing?... Thinking about it, I kinda like the idea of handing that decision off to the application.

• For apps that target Android 5.0 (API level 21) and later, use AudioAttributes to describe the type of audio your app is playing. Apps that play speech should specify CONTENT_TYPE_SPEECH.

That could definitely be a config setting, since the application should know what it's about to play. Don't you think?

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Hi frontyard,

Thanks for releasing support for audio focus into 2.4.0!

I have a problem with the way it currently behaves though: our app monitors the player state via the onSuccess callback and its event.playbackState state to update its GUI elements. When the player loses audio focus, it stops playing as expected, but it looks like the onSuccess callback isn't fired with an event.playbackState of STATE_IDLE as I'd expected it.

So ultimately, when losing audio focus, exoplayer stops playing fine, but our app's GUI still shows a "playing" state.

Is there any other event fired on audio focus loss / regain that I can listen for and react on in the application?

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@netmikey Check out version 2.4.1. There is an event now being fired on audio focus change.

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Sounds great! I'll check this out when I come home 👍

Could you elaborate on what the different AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS* events stand for and how the plugin reacts to each one?

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The events are comging from android AudioManager

On AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS_TRANSIENT and AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS_TRANSIENT_CAN_DUCK we pause.
On AUDIOFOCUS_GAIN we play.
On AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS we close.

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@frontyard are you sure you released 2.4.1? npm shows 2.4.0 as the latest version...

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Okay, so with 2.4.1 it works much better now. When we get any of the AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS events, we explicitly close the player so that our app ends up in the right state. It looks like we never get the AUDIOFOCUS_GAIN event (maybe because we close the player on loss?), but requiring people to hit play manually isn't too much of an issue I think.

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@netmikey Yes, you won't get events back once you close the player. Have you considered not closing the player on AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS_TRANSIENT* and have it just resume automatically?

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We can't do that: if I got it right, you said the player pauses playback. We're streaming live content however. If we pause the live stream and resume it some time in the future, it won't be live anymore and the delay would make for an awkward experience. So we really need the player to stop and restart playback, not just pause.

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That makes sense. I'm actually not comfortable with plugin performing actions based on audio focus events, so I'm thinking about removing the play/pause and just letting the app decide what to do on these events. Would that work better?

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I agree that this would be a cleaner behavior. In this case, we would still need to get the focus gain events, even if we stop (close) the player though. Would that be possible?

We're about to release into production with the current version btw. So it would be awesome if the api could be kept backwards compatible ;-)

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@frontyard We rolled out. Immediate feedback we get: it looks like Android OS withdraws Audio Focus even on notification sounds like "new message", so our player keeps stopping all the time when the sound stage is busy.

Which now puts pressure on me to fix the current behaviour. Have you been able to modify the player so that it lets the application chose what action to take on audio focus loss?

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@netmikey version 2.4.2 no longer acts on audio focus events. Make sure you differentiate between AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS_TRANSIENT, AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS_TRANSIENT_CAN_DUCK and AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS.

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That sounds great! Does 2.4.2 deliver the AUDIOFOCUS_GAIN event even if I closed the player on a previously received AUDIOFOCUS_LOSS event?

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No, close is suppose to be used to dispose of the player. Any event listeners are disposed of as well. When you initialize the player again you can check the status of audio focus.

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Hmm... could you add a "real" stop function then? I'm trying to figure out how to stop and restart live streaming while getting all audio focus events...

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@netmikey I've added .stop function but haven't had time to test it. Please let me know if this works for you. Once you stop you can call setStream(url) to restart the playback.

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I'm assuming this is no longer an issue so closing this ticket.

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