Match media-streamer's live TV player, and go fullscreen on Play

[ralyodio]

Streams died after a minute or two here while media-streamer played the same provider lines all evening. Comparing the two players says why — and it was not the demuxer, the connection, or the provider.

1. The restart budget almost never came back — this is what killed them

The engine rebuilds the player rather than giving up, because a live transport stream changes shape mid-broadcast and MSE throws when it does. The budget for that refilled only after thirty unbroken seconds, measured from the last restart and checked solely from inside the stall watcher.

So three hiccups within half a minute spent the whole allowance and the channel was given up on permanently — even though all three restarts had worked and the picture was back within seconds each time. On a provider line that drops a connection now and then (all of them), that is a hard ceiling of three recoveries per stream. Reaching it takes about a minute.

It now refills on playing, which is what media-streamer's live TV player does and is the right event: it fires when the media element genuinely resumed, so the budget is spent by failures to recover rather than by failures. A channel that never plays still gives up after MAX_RESTARTS, because nothing ever fires it.

MAX_RESTARTS 3 → 5, backoff base 1.5s → 2s, to match.

2. The desktop buffering profile was the opposite of the one that works

	was (desktop)	now (every screen)
enableWorker	unset (false)	true
enableStashBuffer	false	true
stashInitialSize	128 (bytes)	384 * 1024
liveBufferLatencyChasing	true	false
lazyLoad	false	false (+ explicit durations)

liveBufferLatencyChasing closes drift by assigning to currentTime — mpegts.js's own source calls it "not recommended" on the first line of the file implementing it. That is a hard seek, MSE rebuilds the decode pipeline on each one, it is evaluated on every appended fragment, and it leaves only MinRemain — one second — of buffer behind. A jitter spike underruns it, the refill passes the ceiling, it seeks again. Every hitch in that sawtooth was also a chance to spend a restart, which is how a stutter became a stream that ended.

A television already had all three settings right, which is why only desktops complained. There is one profile now, and it is media-streamer's.

This supersedes the liveSync approach in the first commit on this branch. liveSync is arguably gentler, but the same as media-streamer is the thing worth having, and chasing is off either way.

3. Pressing Play fills the screen with the sound up

The video still starts muted, deliberately: autoplay policy refuses audible video without a gesture, the refusal is a rejected play() that leaves a black rectangle, and this handler has already awaited the player bundle — which on a cold cache can outlast the activation the click granted.

So the sound goes up on the first playing, when there is demonstrably a stream to turn up. If the browser answers an unwanted unmute by pausing (which is how Chrome disagrees — it does not throw), it goes back to muted and keeps the picture.

Fullscreen is requested on the stage rather than the <video> so the element keeps its own controls, with the webkit spellings behind it. Every part of it is allowed to fail silently: the stream plays in the page regardless.

Tests

939 pass, 0 fail. test/player-restart.test.js needed real rewriting rather than renumbering — it pinned the old rule directly (half a minute of real playback earns it back, a second of playback between two failures does not). The replacements state the new rule and keep the bound honest:

• a picture earns it back, immediately
• a channel that recovers every time is never given up on — twelve hiccups, no error; this stream was dead on the fourth under the old rule
• a clock that moves is not the same as a picture — progress alone does not refill, so a channel that never resumes still runs out

vendor-mpegts.js rebuilt (the Dockerfile rebuilds it at image build; bun run dev serves it as committed).

Not done here

Consuming @profullstack/player, which carries a copy of this same engine — its mpegts engine was ported from this file, bad desktop profile and thirty-second rule included. profullstack/player#4 fixes it there identically and bumps to 0.4.0. This repo can switch to the package once that is published; the behaviour is already the same either way.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01S5KxNHPQPY9Do9eWfJnGP4