NowPlaying Screen on CarPlay in iOS 14 behaves weird for live streams

Hi,
we are currently integrating the new CarPlay experience in iOS 14 (com.apple.developer.carplay-audio) in our radio app and already use MPNowPlayingInfoCenter and MPRemoteCommandCenter. In this context we came across some weird behavior: when playing a live stream (MPNowPlayingInfoPropertyIsLiveStream = true) the NowPlayingTemplate on CarPlay always displays the stop button even when we only configure for play and pause button. The stop button then doesn't do anything (because we didn't assign any action to it). Also are other actions like skipBackwards and nextTrack disabled.

When declaring the audios property to not live, everything works fine.
Is there any way we can have a live stream and also make the template display pause button and enable other actions?
Up vote post of Cylox Down vote post of Cylox
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Posted by
Cylox
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  • Hey! Did you ever figure out this issue? I'm facing this exact issue right now.

    —
    anders16
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A live stream can't be paused, because it's … live. You can stop watching it for a while, and then pick it up again at a later point, but you can't continue from the place where you stopped.

Similarly, live streams don't have tracks, so you can't skip.

This isn't specific to CarPlay. You'll see the stop button when playing live streams in the Music app too.

Depending on what player or playback mechanism you're using in your app, you may be able to "lie" with your NowPlayingInfo, forcing the display back into the non-live form, but you're going to have to manage your own pseudo-timeline info to make the behavior comprehensible to the user, I guess.
Posted by
Polyphonic
Up vote reply of Polyphonic Down vote reply of Polyphonic

  • Only because one is using the technology stack of HTTP Livestreaming doesn't necessarily mean, that pausing and skipping is out of question. On top of HTTP-Live-Streaming there are multiple serverside solutions to enable pause/play- and skipForward and skipBackward functionality, while providing a constant audio-stream. Please think out of the box.

    As the API and associated documentation doesn't provide any hint to the described behavior it is considered a bug. Especially if the player controls behave differently in the CarPlay environment opposed to the iPhone environment.

    —
    gebhardt.tbo
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