render a dummy video/progress bar

[jimmywarting]

Here is a dumb request that probably very few ppl would want/need, but i would like to be able to control media flinging myself somehow when casting with other means other than using remote playback api.

A senario would be that I would like to cast to a remote peer using WebRTC where the remote device can't be found since you are not in same local network or don't support the remote playback specification. where i can have full control over syncing a remote playback with custom UI such as watermark and other Stuff and also be able to control MSE myself where i might have some widevine encryption that a remote playback can't decrypt on it own. I might also want to use the Presentation API just so that i can control the the receiver but the problem still persist that a video element isn't synced

I have feature plans to show a small pip on top of the video so you can watch two channels at once so you can watch something else until a commercial end or when another program starts, so i basically need two video elements on the receiver

I found and tried to use this dummy mediasource solution
But I never got it to work in chrome, also it don't have the other media tracks that would allow you to change subtitle or video/audio source.

I wish that the controlling device could still shows a progress bar with a play/pause button and still be able to change tracks and dosen't download or render the video on the controllers device.
A option to say "disable local playback" on the video element would be grate to have. it would mean that it could play/pause/seek and download metadata such as length and other useful information on the video element but it wouldn't download or render any of the tracks

The only current solution is to disable the video controller entirely and rewrite everything with a own UI, but it would just have had been easier if i could attach all needed event listener to the <video> element instad of switching over to listening on the DataChannel. and custom play/pause/seek DOM element

[markafoltz]

Sorry for the late reply.

It sounds like you want to configure a <video> element with metadata about audio, video, and text tracks, so the browser will render media controls as if the media was playing locally. However, you have some other solution for fetching and rendering the media on another device with WebRTC so you want the browser's media controls to act as if playback were happening locally.

I think there are a few solutions here. One idea is to pre-process your media tracks into a container that has the metadata you want, but does not have encoded audio and video data. It would still need to be valid media that the browser can render for the <video> element to respond to controls as expected. Then you would render something else locally in place of the video frames?

If you don't need to use the browser's default media controls, then rendering your own media player controls avoids the need for these workarounds.

I am not sure that this exact situation falls in the scope of the Remote Playback API as it is focused on cases where the browser implements remote playback (versus app-to-app media sharing through WebRTC or other means).