Updating Media from 1.8.2 to 1.9.X makes casting not work

[ziem]

Hello!
I recently updated a project from 1.8.0 to 1.9.1. Unfortunately, it makes casting not work. By not working, I mean:

• I play a video on my phone
• I click the cast icon
• I select the cast device
• video surface becomes black (I can still hear audio)
• the cast device starts showing the app name
• and that's it, the playback (audio) continues to play on the device with black screen and the cast device only shows the app name

I'm using the CompositePlayer concept similar to the one in the following gist:
https://gist.github.com/NielsMasdorp/d22c9286aa1bd3e1629258d156e7c6e2#file-media3composite-kt-L87

I've just bumped the library; I have not migrated to the new RemoteCastPlayer. I'm still using the deprecated CastPlayer constructor.

All versions, including 1.9.0, 1.9.1, and 1.9.2, have the same issues. I have browsed the changelog, but my impression was that the previous behavior is preserved when using the deprecated constructor.

1.8.0 works fine.

Is there anything more that I may be missing that could cause the issue to appear?

[marcbaechinger]

Thanks for your report and sorry for the inconvenience.

I have not migrated to the new RemoteCastPlayer

That's a long shot but have you tried replacing CastPlayer with RemoteCastPlayer in your app? That should be equivalent to what you had before.

The full migration would be to use CastPlayer to replace your composite player approach. That's the actual new thing now.

From the fact that you are not aware of this I think we should somehow document that migration path more clearly. I'm not completely familiar how this is documented currently. I add the 'documentation candidate' for now.

Please let me know whether just switching to RemoteCastPlayer helps.

[marcbaechinger]

I checked the current documentation. We have documented this already in the release notes [1] and in the constructor of the CastPlayer constructors [2].

My suggestion from above should work accordingly.

I wonder where we can make this most obvious for developers? Can you let me know where the documentation about should have been placed best, to get your attention? What documentation did you check after noticing the problem. Such insight could help us find the best places for such documentation, so that we don't create too much of confusion with similar moves.

[1] https://github.com/androidx/media/blob/release/RELEASENOTES.md?plain=1#L546-L559
[2] https://github.com/androidx/media/blob/release/libraries/cast/src/main/java/androidx/media3/cast/CastPlayer.java#L192-L195

[AquilesCanta]

but my impression was that the previous behavior is preserved when using the deprecated constructor.

Yes, that should definitely be the case. If that's not the case then we have a bug. I'm a bit sad it's detected only now though. I'll try your gist locally to see where things went wrong.

So, thank you for reporting!

[ziem]

@marcbaechinger, maybe I wasn't clear, but I think that the changelog, release notes, and blog post clearly state the deprecation and the new way of doing player switching. My ultimate goal is to migrate to the new CastPlayer, but for now I wanted to do one step at a time.

I was just confused why bumping the library to 1.9.X causes casting not work. I updated Media3 library multiple times in the past and everything worked fine. Most of the times I only had to update CompositePlayer (which implements the Player interface) because some methods were added/removed, etc. My observation is that "The pre-existing CastPlayer constructors keep their old behavior, but are deprecated in favour of using the CastPlayer or RemoteCastPlayer builders instead." is not true for my project.

I've just tried replacing CastPlayer with the RemoteCastPlayer, but I see the same behavior. CompositePlayer switches to RemoteCastPlayer, a cast session is created, the app name appears on my cast device, but playback is not transferred to the cast device. Do you have any other hints?

@AquilesCanta I checked the CastPlayer's code history but I couldn't find anything that could cause this behavior. In addition to CompositePlayer we are also using custom MediaItemConverter that was copied from https://github.com/androidx/media/blob/3f366109b7e5cbf7b7e5b46e8b923e167e9ae893/libraries/cast/src/main/java/androidx/media3/cast/DefaultMediaItemConverter.java and modified. Switching back to the current DefaultMediaItemConverter doesn't solve the issue. There are probably more nuances related to this project, but currently I'm trying to understand what change from 1.9.X version is causing this issue.

[icbaker]

@ziem One thing you could try is to bump your com.google.android.gms:play-services-cast-framework dependency without bumping your media3 dep.

So while using media3 1.8.0 add a gradle dependency on com.google.android.gms:play-services-cast-framework:22.1.0 (which is what media3 1.9.2 uses).

That will help isolate whether the problem you're seeing is coming from media3 code, or from the updated cast dependency.

[ziem]

@icbaker thanks for the hint. The project is already using 22.2.0 version of the play-services-cast-framework library. Bumping it to the newest version (23.2.0) does not affect casting when using Media3 1.8.0. I also tried downgrading it to 22.1.0 - still works fine.

[AquilesCanta]

Hey @ziem I've just tested the deprecated constructors using the cast demo app (I replace the RemoteCastPlayer constructor invocation with the deprecated constructor's invocation) and things work fine (the player manager implementation in the cast demo app is not too different from what you show in the gist). This suggests that, at least, the deprecated constructors are not completely broken and there's more to this issue.

I'm going to try and incorporate the code gist you shared to see if I quickly find anything else. But please help with the following:

• Please share a bugreport captured shortly after reproducing the issue. If you can include a screenrecording that covers your reproduction of the issue that'd be great as that makes it easier for me to map your actions to log events. (that is: capture video 'adb shell screenrecord', then capture a bugreport adb bugreport)
• Please debug on your side this:

- video surface becomes black (I can still hear audio)
- the cast device starts showing the app name
- and that's it, the playback (audio) continues to play on the device with black screen and the cast device only shows the app name

• If the Cast device shows your app name, that means that a Cast session started.
• If your local playback has changed (no video) that means you got some callback indicating the session started.
• If the audio continues locally, that means the local player wasn't stopped or released.

The combination of these three means at least there's something wrong on the dual player management code, I believe. And until I'm able to repro, or I get more info, I don't think I'll be able to help. I'd be surprised if there was nothing in the logs though.