Chromecast - block loadMedia until the previous one returns

Question

I'm writing an iOS app that uses chromecast to cast a series of pictures. When the user taps on the right edge of the current picture, the app presents the next picture, and the next picture is casted to the bigger screen. However, if the user taps fast enough and brings up the third picture before the second picture shows up on the bigger screen, the second picture, once shows up, will stay there even though the third picture shows up on the device. From the Google Cast SDK it looks like all the casting requests are queued up and the third one should show up automatically. So does this mean I have to queue the requests manually on the sender side?

Answer 1

I imagine your images are available on a server (which could be your phone as well). What receiver are you using? What is the behavior you expect to have? If, for example, you need to see all the images no matter how fast you cast them, then your receiver should queue the urls of images and when is completely loaded, loads the next one, etc. If you expect to skip over the previous images if a new one is casted, then your receiver should drop the previous requests as soon as a new one comes in.

You can queue them on the sender side as well (especially for the first scenario) and your sender should listen to "image is fully loaded so send in the next one) but that is not optimal since

• your app creates a better experience if the next image is loaded behind the scene on the receiver while the first one is being shown so it can quickly transition to the next one and
• You probably want to provide an experience that if you queue up some photos, your app can play them on the TV even if your phone gets disconnected (only relevant if images are served from a separate server).

Another factor to consider is what do you expect if a second device is connected to your Chromecsst while the first one is casting; do you want to the second one be able to "participate" in the activity and cast as well or not.

Regardless, there is a sample code on our github repo that shows a simple playlist for videos (queued up on the receiver).