recloudstream / recloudstream/cloudstream

Add option to disable AUTOPLAY

Open
#1,315 5 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

enhancement possible provider issue
Dominant language
Kotlin
Stars
10.7k
Forks
1.1k
Avg merge
1d 23h
Merged PRs (30d)
15

Description

On Android TV would be better to have autoplay disabled.

In other apps like Stremio, when you click on a certain movie, you are first presented a screen where all your installed addons show all fetched links for that movie. So you can navigate through them and select the one of your preference (maybe a torrent or an online stream, etc). Once you click on a particular link, the player opens and the movie begins.

In Cloudstream things are a little different. First you have to choose the plugin and you open a movie in that particular plugin. But you don't see the different links that plugin fetches until the player is open and the movie already started (or at least is trying to start). That causes problems: Some plugins fetch 20 or more links, and 20 subtitles as well. That takes a considerable amount of time (30 secs-1 min.) until ALL the links and subtitles are fetched. But at the same time, the player is trying to play the first link, which many times is a 4k link, stressing the app and causing frequent crashings. I state that I'm using Cloudstream ONLY on Android TV (on a Philips TV). As you know, Tvs have less ram memory and CPU capacity than phones and are much likely to crash when they are forced to do several tasks at the same time. To make things worse, many times the first link returns an error of "time out" and the player AUTOMATICALLY tries to start playing the second one. But on occasions the first link in the background finally finishes to load and the audio starts, without the image (as the player is already trying to play another link). The only way to exit from that is stopping app completely, delete cache and restart.

All of that could be easily avoided if there was an OPTION in Settings-Player to turn AUTOPLAY ON or OFF at user preference.
So in my case and probably for all those who run Cloudstream in non-powerful devices, the best choice would be to turn autoplay off. So when I click "Play" on a particular movie, the following should happen: The player launches and the plugin starts to load all the streams and subtitles it can fetch, WITHOUT TRYING TO START PLAYING ANYTHING. I gladly wait 30 secs. for that process to finish, and then clicking on "Sources" I could navigate through all the available links and choose the one of my preference, then on the right column I select the subtitle I want, and finally click on "Apply" and only then the movie starts to play.

That autoplay on-off feature would be a simple but huge improvement, at least for TV version.

Acknowledgements
  • My suggestion is NOT about adding a new provider
  • I have searched the existing issues and this is a new ticket, NOT a duplicate or related to another open issue.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files or tests are named. Start by tracing the Settings-Player option and the Android TV player flow described in the issue; done means autoplay can be toggled and, when disabled, sources and subtitles load without starting playback until the user selects them and applies the choice.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
android, kotlin
Domain
mobile-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.