Use current ExoPlayer for Rich sample about androidtv-sample-inputs

[Fleker]

I don't think there's a major difference between 1.5.3 and 1.5.5, but it will be using the latest version next time I update my project. As for subtitle integration, is that something you know about? It would be great if you could contribute to the project as I don't really know where to start.

[micolous]

I had a go at porting this based on your CumulusTV code, but got stuck because of other ExoPlayer bugs. I was fiddling trying to get it to behave, only to find that there was an issue with the H264 stream my IPTV provider puts out and it also doesn't support MP2 audio. 😞

As a result I probably got some working code, but then summarily destroyed it in the debugging process because I failed to use version control. Not a lot of changes occurred in 1.5.3 to 1.5.5 of ExoPlayer, but there's enough that it doesn't build cleanly out of the box.

I'm not sure of a solution to subtitle integration, as the streams I was attempting to work with either didn't have subtitles, or used Teletext / VBI subtitles (which I don't think are supported by ExoPlayer). I merely noted it as an omission, though I don't recall if the original Google sample code also omitted it.

In the end I used one of Kodi's IPTV plugins to write support for my IPTV provider. This took less than an hour to write a small Python script that translated the playlist file into the correct format, and rewrite the URLs to use udpxy. This is compared to the 12+ hours I spent attempting to use Android TV APIs.

CumulusTV could have saved me some trouble here, but I would have still run up against other codec issues anyway.

[ryanseys]

I'm working on adding this. And it will support subtitles! 😄

[ryanseys]

I've updated the sample to use the latest ExoPlayer (1.5.6) and it supports subtitles (see the BipBop channel within this sample). You may have to clear the current data in your Live Channels app and reinstall the channels from this sample app to get it all to work properly.

Let me know if you encounter any issues.

[micolous]

Awesome, thanks!

It looks like half of my codec issue in ExoPlayer has also been fixed, so I'll have to have another attempt at making this work in future.