Apple TV Integration press-and-hold or long-press interactions all missing

[methnen]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Description

On Apple TV certain buttons have alternate functionality that you get to by pressing and holding a button on the remote.

For instance pressing and holding forwards or backwards on the direction pad puts the video into fast forward/rewind mode.

Pressing and holding on the play/pause button puts you in edit mode while on the Home Screen.

Pressing and holding the Home button brings up the control center.

Pressing and holding the center/select/confirm button often brings up contextual menus.

These are all quite useful and I've immediately found the fact that they're missing pretty frustrating. The editing of the Home Screen and fast forward/rewind bits and center button ones are particularly useful for my use but I imagine plenty of folks will be missing the ability to hit the Control Center as well.

I'm also noticing that it doesn't look like the remote can detect, a press-and-hold value or at least has no way of setting up that sort of interaction in the current UI.

The Harmony and NEEO remotes I have can handle these interactions though the actual setup of them is much less flexible than on the RemoteTwo.

How to Reproduce

1. Add Apple TV integration
2. Try to setup any of the press-and-hold type interaction
3. Note that none of the the commands are in the list and there's no way to tell there remote to behave differently when a button has been pressed and held instead of simply clicked

Expected behavior

To be able to use the press-and-hold interactions with the Apple TV.

System version

v1.2.1

What part of the system affected by the problem?

UI, Web Configurator, Integration

Additional context

See Apple docs on using the Apple TV remote:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205305

[kennymc-c]

I took a look at the debug logs of the ATV integration and noticed that this integration is based on pyatv which actually should be able to support input actions like double tap and hold (https://pyatv.dev/documentation/supported_features/#feature-list).
So hopefully this will be integrated soon.

[Talkabout]

I don't want to create another feature request for this so mentioning it here: "long-press" assignment should be possible also for "IR Remotes" and "Activity buttons" to assign custom functionality when a button is pressed and hold. This would allow much more flexibility.

[zehnm]

Short update: it's in our backlog and the pyatv communication library we are using supports long presses.
After the activity group release I'll have a look. An initial quick improvement could be using free media-player commands like menu for long pressing center or home.
The fully configurable long-press functionality (not just for Apple TV) for all R2 buttons & intgrations will take a bit longer.

[Talkabout]

Hi @zehnm ,

thanks for the update, much appreciated!

What do you mean with using "media-player commands like menu"? Would that work for AndroidTV also? There I am missing the long press for open the context menu (usually long press of OK button).

[zehnm]

@Talkabout until we add custom commands to a media-player entity or support a remote-entity, we are limited to the defined features of the media-player entity (e.g. dpad control, menu, back, home etc). If a feature is not yet used, we can use it for example to send a fixed, long-press command to the Apple TV. The pyatv library defines single-, double-, 1-second-presses for certain commands. So it would be super simple to use the unused media-player menu command for a 1-second command.
I'll test it.

[kennymc-c]

@zehnm By "fully configurable long-press functionality" you are also referring to #94 ?