Playback controls on 3rd party IR remotes?

My Siri Remote trackpad has stopped working, but luckily I have a leftover Tivo remote. I set it up to control the ATV including the playback controls and it was all set. For navigation and selecting it works fine, but playback buttons don’t seem to affect Channels. Playback buttons work fine in other apps (Netflix, HBO GO). The ATV light blinks so I know it received the request.

I hope this is supported by Channels soon, because then I’ll have one remote that finally does everything, instead of juggling 2 remotes… and the Tivo remote is pretty sweet even without a Tivo.

Which playback buttons aren’t working?

None are working… play, pause, FF, RW, skip back, skip FW. But these do work in other streaming apps on ATV4.
The playback controls work in Channels via the Apple remotes only.

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Understood.

Most apps use the native tvOS video player. We had to write our own video player to support the video format coming from the HDHomeRun.

AFAICT, there is no public api available in tvOS to detect when IR codes come in for those buttons. The native video player must be using some private apis which are not available to us. We only get generic events like Select which can be triggered by any remote, including the old apple aluminum remote and the siri remote.

I will do some more research to see what’s possible, and open a bug report with Apple for the missing APIs.

I have submitted bug report #29432734 to Apple about this.

Cool, thanks! You guys certainly are responsive, that definitely makes the purchase more worthwhile.

I found a couple of old threads (early 2016) on the Plex forums reporting the same issue with IR playback controls, but the IR play/pause is working for me now in the Plex app. Do you know if Plex using Apple’s native player?

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Yes Plex uses the native player. They use Plex Media Server to transcode all video files into HLS, which is the only format supported by iOS and tvOS natively.

Sooooooooo I’m apparently an idiot.

I discovered that while the playback controls don’t do anything, the “select” button does, as well as the left/right arrows.
Select performs play/pause, left skips back, right skips forward. It’s not ideal, but at least I can utilize the single remote now (just need to train the wife that “select” means pause, and “pause” means nothing).

Not sure what the Apple’s playback button mappings are actually for (aside from the fact that they work in Apple’s native player only) when other mappings do the same thing.

That’s right, select/left/right will always work.

I actually heard back from Apple today on my bug report. They’ve pointed me at some APIs that we might be able to use to detect the other button presses.

We’re currently heads-down on DVR, but I will try to implement the IR handling code for the next ATV app release.

This has been added in 2.1.17: Expanded Media Keys for IR Remotes

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