Rebinding adcontainer to IMA SDK android

[Toby Bonhof]

Dear,

Currently we are building a new Video SDK in Android which uses the IMA SDK 3.19.4 for Android. Currently the architecture of our Video SDK requires us to create a *new* Activity whenever the user switches the video player to full screen. This is because we have no control over the context in which the video is being played. Which in turns means we can not utilize the configChanges from Android.

What i wanted to do is to rebind a new adcontainer viewgroup to the AdsLoader or to the ima sdk in some way. unfortunately i have not found that this is possible without creating a whole new AdsLoader and thus starting the ads all over from the beginning. This would cause for a really poor user experience.

Is there any way we could rebind a new ad container so that the ima sdk gets drawn into the newly created overlay view. for seamless playback of the video.

kind regards,

Toby Bonhof

DPG Media

[IMA SDK]

Hi Toby,

Thank you for sharing what you would like to do with our SDK in your SDK with us. What I get from what you are saying, you want to offer an SDK that can survive configuration changes that "are out of your control" and continue going where left off in content and ads. Currently, our Sample apps limit configuration changes in the manifest to provide continuity and we have no support for this in our SDK. Here are a couple of questions:

1. Do you want this in client side or DAI or both? 
2. SDK's have requirements to use them correctly - making configChange in Manifest a requirement may be easier for users of your SDK than other styles of continuity because there's a great deal of plumbing in a configuration change that has to take place. Is there a real desire for this by end users/publishers? 
3. What style would you be interested in i.e. passing app context and attaching activity context dynamically, or exposing a method to get the VAST and save it and restart from the middle or something else?
4. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Regards,

Aryeh Baker IMA SDK Team

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[Toby Bonhof]

Hi!

Thanks for getting back to me.

1. Do you want this in client side or DAI or both? 

Client side i believe :) not sure what DAI is.

- SDK's have requirements to use them correctly - making configChange in Manifest a requirement may be easier for users of your SDK than other styles of continuity because there's a great deal of plumbing in a configuration change that has to take place. Is there a real desire for this by end users/publishers? 

I understand that SDK can put up requirements towards their clients. But the problem is that our clients can typically not control the config changes as well since our organisation and therefore the apps are really structured in modules. Not all of our platforms (apps, our clients, or consumers of the SDK) are written in pure Android. some of them are written in React-Native which makes handeling activities and states really hard if not impossible. That's why when a video goes full screen we actually create a NEW activity (FullscreenActivity.kt) and decouple the ExoPlayer from the previously playing Textureview and pass it into the newly created textureview by FullscreenActivity.kt. This is why configchanges are out of the question. And why we need to rebind the ad display container to a new container.

What style would you be interested in i.e. passing app context and attaching activity context dynamically, or exposing a method to get the VAST and save it and restart from the middle or something else?

I would be interested in some kind of setter on the `AdDisplayContainer` to rebind a new ad container to the currently playing ad.

Something like this:

// we first create the original (inline player) ad display container 
val adDisplayContainer = ImaSdkFactory.createAdDisplayContainer(currentAdContainerViewGroup, adPlayer)

// Video and ad are playing

// user decides to play fullscreen

// FullscreenActivity.kt gets created, new VideoView gets created, and gets binded to the currently playing ExoPlayer

// Ima SDK now needs to rebind to the newly created ad container

adDisplayContainer.setAdContainer(newlyCreatedAdContainerViewGroup)

// IMA SDK starts to draw the overlay in the new container

I hope the abvove usecase / flow makes sense.

Thanks in advance. If need be I'm always available for a call. 

Toby Bonhof

[IMA SDK]

Hi Tony,

Thank you for the feedback. I raised your request up to the rest of my team. You may monitor our release notes for an update.

[IMA SDK]

Hi Toby,

My team circled back to me and we are requesting can you supply a project based on our Sample apps that demonstrates what your use case is missing with steps to illustrate what is missing and what functionality you would like?

[Toby Bonhof]

Hi!

I will work on getting a sample ready for you guys in the coming days. To what email can i send a zip with the project?

[IMA SDK]

Hi Toby,

Thank you for your response. You can send the project file to our email alias: imate...@gmail.com.


Regards,

Sherwin Diesta IMA SDK Team

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[Toby Bonhof]

The sample has been sent out to the email address you've mentioned above

[IMA SDK]

Hi Toby,

thank you for responding back. I work along with Sherwin and Aryeh. As such I will be helping you today. Thank you for the sample app. I have brought this to our teams attention and they will be certain to look this over and see what we can do to helop you. Once we have some feedback, we will be sure to pass it along.

Regards

William Pescherine IMA SDK Team

 

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[Toby Bonhof]

Hi all,

Any news on this topic?

[IMA SDK]

Hi Toby,

Thank you for expressing interest in how it's going. My team has been looking at your proposal. I relayed your message to my team. You may monitor our release notes for an update.

Regards,

Aryeh Baker IMA SDK Team

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[IMA SDK]

Hi Toby,

My team has a question on how your exoplayer integration would look - they're not clear on why the process for "decoupling the ExoPlayer instance and passing it to the new activity" can't also be used for the AdsLoader and AdDisplayContainer. Could you clarify what this process is?

Regards,

Aryeh Baker IMA SDK Team

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[Toby Bonhof]

That is possible and exactly the thing I am doing however. When creating a new activity the views that are created are new instances. And the AdsLoader that is in memory will still have a reference to the old view group of Activity A in which it is drawing the ad overlay. That's why i need to re-set the viewgroup of the ad display container to the ad loader.

The AdDisplayContainer needs to get an updated viewgroup of the newly created activity. and your current sdk / api does not allow me to do that.

Toby

[IMA SDK]

Hi Toby,

Thank you for your response. Let me relay this information to my teammates and will give you feedback once we have an update.


Regards,

Sherwin Diesta IMA SDK Team

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[IMA SDK]

Hi there,

 

I hope you are doing well.

 

Random checking on old cases. Would want to know if this issue still occurs on your end?

 

Regards,

Michael Angelo Legaspi IMA SDK Team

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