"Background playing by default" setting is broken

[JPGuillemin]

Checklist

• I am able to reproduce the bug with the latest version.
• I made sure that there are no existing issues - open or closed - which I could contribute my information to.
• I have taken the time to fill in all the required details. I understand that the bug report will be dismissed otherwise.
• This issue contains only one bug.
• I have read and understood the contribution guidelines.

Affected version

0.23.0

Steps to reproduce the bug

1 go to settings -> Video&Audio -> Behaviour / Prefered Playing Method
2 Select Background Playing in the list
3 Go back to the medias screen
4 Launch a song
5 The video is still played , not just audio as expected : you have to manually press the "play in background" button to get audio only

(Above translated menu titles from french interface.)

Expected behavior

Selecting background playing as default behavior should play all songs without video

Actual behavior

You have to manually press "play in background" button even if you have configured newpipe to play in background by default

Screenshots/Screen recordings

No response

Logs

No response

Affected Android/Custom ROM version

Android 12 IMUI13

Affected device model

Xiaomi 12

Additional information

No response

[SameenAhnaf]

Actually, that's not the purpose of Preferred 'Open' Action. This setting is supposed to work for supported shared links only, not for videos inside the app.

Screenrecorder-2022-06-27-13-53-57-807.0.mp4

[JPGuillemin]

S‌o : what is the option to set when you want by default : just the sound (in CD quality opus128), without useless video playback ??  

[AudricV]

There is no option to play as audio-only (or popup either) by default. The play icon on the thumbnail is to play the content in the main player. If you want to do so, you will have to use the background button.

As Sameen said, the option you quoted is the one when sharing links or opening links on NewPipe from external applications.

The description of this preference should be changed to avoid this type of confusion.

You can also use the background player option when pausing the app/putting it in background.

The player will always ensure, if possible (if an audio stream is available), to not fetch the video stream¹ and the subtitles in this case.

¹This has some limitations: currently some data is fetched for intialization purposes (mostly some kilobytes up to a few megabytes) (in order to determine what track is audio and what track is video) (for progressive playback), but with the switch to DASH for playback which will be included in version 0.23.1, this will not happen.

The issue happens however on livestreams, which uses HLS, at least on YouTube, and we are waiting for a change the player library we use (ExoPlayer) to fix this, which should not happen soon because the corresponding issue in their tracker about disabling the fetch of video tracks when video tracks are disabled has been marked as low priority.

That's also the case for the audio-only mode on livestreams, at least on YouTube too.

Details to better understand what I explained above

Big streaming services uses adaptive streaming technologies to provide you contents. Most of them have the ability to have video and audio tracks separated. The most popular ones are DASH and HLS, which have this capability. There is also SmoothStreaming for instance.

YouTube uses mainly DASH, and also provides HLS for Apple clients and a few legacy formats with video and audio in the same video file (the ones you can hear sound when playing contents in external players).

Merging of video and audio streams is done by clients (players). That's what we do.

Since version 0.23.0, fetching of separated video and audio streams is preferred to video streams with audio, in order to provide a seamless transition: the player is not reloaded in audio-only mode (where possible, this mode was always used before and was the reason why you heard a cut) but video and text tracks are disabled instead, so you don't hear the change.

[JPGuillemin]

OK, it makes it clearer :)
Any chances to have a permanent "audio only" option : disabling completely video playing and just keeping the thumbnail (often the album cover) ?
Ymusic works this way btw..

[opusforlife2]

#2610 covers what you want, but it's much broader. You could open a more focused issue for your specific request.

[JPGuillemin]

#2610 covers what you want, but it's much broader. You could open a more focused issue for your specific request.

Great !! Thanks

[litetex]

I guess we can close this then