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

Question

Created Oct ’20

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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?

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Oct ’20

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.

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Answer 2

anders16 OP

Jun ’21

Hey! Did you ever figure out this issue? I'm facing this exact issue right now.

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