Testers needed for video streaming

[mardy]

Note: the instructions in this post are for expert users only, or for those who don't mind having to reflash their device if something goes wrong.

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Hi there!
I've lately been working on a native application to watch videos from Youtube and other online services, without ads.

While the application works on the desktop, in Ubuntu Touch it's totally non functional because the media-hub component supports local media files only.

After some hacking on the media-hub and qtubuntu-media I got the videos to play, even though the application is still far from stable.

You can see a video here: https://youtu.be/wTygEsa_Er4

Now I want to have my patches to media-hub reviewed, but first I need to be relatively sure that they don't introduce regressions. The same component is responsible for playing videos and audio files, so both the Media player and the Music app need to be thoroughly tested.

If you'd like to help, please install this PPA in your device, which can be done by running the following command from a terminal in the device:

sudo ubports-qa install xenial_-_remotemedia

This should force the update of the media-hub and qtubuntu-media packages; if that's not happening, another option is to just download the deb files for armhf from here and here and install them manually with dpkg. After doing that, issue the command

initctl restart media-hub

or (better) restart your device, and verify (with the media player and music applications, mainly) that there are no regressions.

You can then install the MiTubo click package and try to play some videos from Youtube (following the steps I did in the video linked before), keeping in mind that this could crash and not working reliably. But what I'm mostly interested in knowing is that existing device functionality is not being broken.

Ciao,
Alberto

[danqo6]

Hello, occasional podbird contributor here,
it is great to see that somebody is looking into ubports media stack. I will test your beta build. There are mainly 2 issues about streaming media I met with podbird:
1.) https://github.com/ubports/media-hub/issues/12 play some stream, then turn off network, wait until playback hangs, turn on the network and try to play another stream. Result is that you need to restart app to play anything.
2.) issue is when during playing some media network is not fast enough and buffering of content is necessary, playback is not paused and it will skip part of the media
Another nice to have thing would be to be able setup metadata for sound indicator: album art, media name and the author
I know that these issues are not regressions, but they are bothering me with podbird a lot and maybe it would be useful to be fixed for your app too.
Thanks for all your effort, and I am going to test your build now

[mardy]

2.) issue is when during playing some media network is not fast enough and buffering of content is necessary, playback is not paused and it will skip part of the media

I think I noticed this too. I've now reported it as a bug. Thanks!

[arubislander]

@mardy Yes, this is not a regression caused by the new media hub. This behavior was present from the start.