Amazon Fire TV Remote Not Pausing ExoPlayer When Controls Hidden

Question

I'm working on an Android library which is just a simple video player wrapping ExoPlayer. When using an Amazon Fire TV I can navigate my app using the remote (the directional pad switches between elements in my view) and I can control the player (the play/pause button will toggle the playing state and the seek buttons work as intended).... so long as the control bar is visible

After 3 seconds or so the control bar auto-hides, and the remote control becomes non-responsive

Is there an appropriate fix for this, or do I need to manually detect key presses on the remote and show the control bar? I feel like this is the kind of thing Amazon's port of ExoPlayer should have resolved

Update

I extended the PlayerView class and overrode the dispatchKeyEvent method to see what was being seen:

public class Test extends PlayerView {
    @Override
    public boolean dispatchKeyEvent(KeyEvent event)
    {
        Log.debug("***** KEY EVENT: " + String.valueOf(event.getKeyCode()) + " *********");
        return true;
    }
}

Doing this and pressing the play button on the remote I noticed:

• When the control bar was visible, a KeyEvent with a keyCode value of 85 was dispatched
• When the control bar was hidden, this method never triggered

I skimmed through the methods available to PlayerView to see if any were helpful, but nothing seemed worthwhile:

• setControllerAutoShow - determines if control bar is shown when video first starts
• setControllerHideDuringAds - determines if the control bar is visible while an ad is playing
• setControllerHideOnTouch - irrelevant on FireTV (no touch events) but hides the control bar if you tap the video
• setControllerHideTimeoutMs - can delay the hiding of the control bar, but otherwise doesn't let me bring it back after it's hidden
• showController - can forcibly reveal the controller in code, allowing me to pause the video, but I without being able to see keyup events I can't properly call this when a button is pressed on the remote control

Ultimately I just want this to behave like the Netflix or Hulu apps -- the control bar goes away after a few seconds of inactivity but if you press the pause button the control bar comes back.

Answer 1

I expanded a bit on your solution to let all the controls work - both the player's and the activity's - since it was not possible to exit the activity anymore and also, on different devices such as phones, it wasn't possible to operate the volume control... this makes everything work, both on the Fire devices and on other devices. I hope it is helpful is someone else stubles into this.

@Override
public boolean dispatchKeyEvent(KeyEvent event) {
    // this sends them to the playerView but also to the activity - whoever wants it first
    return playerView.dispatchKeyEvent(event) || super.dispatchKeyEvent(event);
}