I'm working on streaming tvOS app and as you know there are mostly two type of video streams - live and vod. AVPlayerViewController handles these types of streams by showing respective playback controls. Recently I got a task to implement synchronous vod playback(syncVod), it's when we need to simulate live playback while actual vod stream playback. In order to simulate live playback below things needs to be handled:
- Disabling scrubbing via remote. (Done. playerVc.requiresLinearPlayback = true)
- Disabling info panel view w/play "From beginning" button. (Done, playerVc.playbackControlsIncludeInfoViews = false)
- Disabling play/pause button.(Done, not ideally though. On rate change observer - if player.rate == 0 && playbackMode == .syncVod { player.play() return }). Why not ideal solution - tapping on remote causes quite short hiccup in playback - but playback resumes, no actual pause happens.
- Hiding progress bar and time labels. :(
Point #4 is the main problem, we can't hide progress bar and it's related UI elements(time labels) particularly, but only hide all playback controls - playerVc.showsPlaybackControls = false. The thing is I have custom buttons in transportBarCustomMenuItems and hiding all playback controls is not the right option for me.
Implementing custom playback controls panel is kind of heavy lift, but as of now it seems the only proper way of implementing syncVod playback ideally.
Did anyone face similar issue and could resolve it w/out implementing custom playback controls panel ? Is there way to hide progress bar only in tvOS AVPlayerViewController?