Play video in the background in TVML - tvos

Question

I'm starting a player and then pushing a document onto the navigation stack. Video is playing in the background but is not visible as the document is occupying the screen. Can anyone please tell me how to make the document transparent or is there any better approach to achieve the same?

Answer 1

Overlay TVML?
TVJS player property overlayDocument, see https://developer.apple.com/library/tvos/documentation/TVMLJS/Reference/TVJSPlayer_Ref/index.html or https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/18431

Answer 2

You can get interactive overlay over videos as referred to in the following link:
http://devstreaming.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2016/212s41rh77qgdg26s86/212/212_developing_tvos_apps_using_tvmlkit_part_1.pdf
Overlays can be made interactive since you are essentially adding documents to overlay doc. So any kind of button lock up will work just fine.

Answer 3

Interactive overlay document is the way to go. The following code shows how this is done.
App.onLaunch = function(options) {
var singleVideo = new MediaItem('video', 'http://somevideo.mp4');
var videoList = new Playlist();
videoList.push(singleVideo)
var myPlayer = new Player();
myPlayer.playlist = videoList;
var parser = new DOMParser();
var parsedDoc = parser.parseFromString(`<document>
<alertTemplate>
<button>
<text>Click Me</text>
</button>
</alertTemplate>
</document>`, "application/xml");
myPlayer.interactiveOverlayDocument = parsedDoc;
myPlayer.interactiveOverlayDismissable = false;
myPlayer.play();
}
Apple doesn't have a lot of doc on it. but they did mention it in WWDC,
slide 98-102 of the WWDC 2016 presentation.
the end of this document-- Apple TV Markup Language Reference-- Compound Multimedia Elements
and an example in TVML Guide: Core concepts in TVML and TVMLKit-- Server/PlaybackVideo/index.js
This thing does have some bugs, namely the interactiveOverlayDismissable value not being active if the video is the first thing you display, or does this whole thing play well with the native code outside of TVML. But this is the easier part to do video background.
Note, you might want to add some even listeners to replay the video at the end, as the default behavior is to pop the view.