I’ve developed a third party Twitch app for the Blackberry10 platform, and in order to comply with the developer terms of service I have opted to use the HTML5 player. For the most part it works well, however there a few issues that I would appreciate if other developers here could shed some light on:
Upon loading the stream, a commercial plays every time without fail. Is this normal behavior? It seems excessive.
When the commercials play, the video is absent, however the audio plays without error. This wasn’t always the case, it has only just started doing this, and I cannot tell for sure if it was something in my code or not. Has anyone else had this problem?
The on screen controls appear after the user initiates a touch even, however they do not seem time out and disappear. Again, has anyone else had a similar issue on a mobile platform?
Are these known issues with the player? Or is it an issue with BB10? I realize BlackBerry is not a popular name in the mobile world and it might be easy to point to the OS as the problem, however it has scored well with HTML5 tests and is more than capable.
Furthermore, is the Twitch player under current development? The documentation on embedding the html variant is sparse when compared to the flash version. For instance, is it possible to control stream quality, autoplay, etc?
My experience so far has made it very tempting to access the direct video feeds and circumvent the Twitch player all together.
Twitch’s HTML5 player is pretty barebones at this point in time, mostly due to the fact that HLS is really only used on mobile devices. Only Safari on OSX even has the ability to play HLS feeds. I think once a live streaming standard comes about that all the major browsers decide that they want to utilize, Twitch may be more inclined to work towards HTML5 support for video.
For the HTML5 player, I’m pretty sure broadcasters cannot run ads for HTML5 players (during their stream). To offset this, I believe Twitch always runs a preroll.
This is definitely a problem with Twitch’s player, as I was just able to reproduce it in Safari on OSX.
The HTML5 video controls differ by how the browser decided to implement them. It’s possible that the browser Blackberry uses is causing the controls to operate in an unideal way. I’d suggest reaching out to the developers of the browser with concerns about that.
Development isn’t really going anywhere as HTML5 live video, as stated already, is basically not ready yet. Twitch uses Apple’s HLS solution, but Google is also pushing for MPEG-DASH. If you look around at the bug trackers for Chromium and Firefox, both entities are not willing to implement HLS support (see 54198 - chromium - An open-source project to help move the web forward. - Monorail and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=577084). There’s been a lot of work into a MediaSource extension for HTML5 that would ultimately allow any sort of chunked video solution to work, but it’s still in development and only supports codecs which are supported in-browser (to which h264 is being phased out in Chrome, but Firefox just got Cisco’s OpenH264 in version 33).