What's New - 12 May 2025
Improvements to the player and lifecycle interfaces now make it easy for you to take full advantage of the power of Senza, with remarkably few lines of code.
Player
The client library now includes a new Shaka Player subclass that can manage the Remote Player for you.
- Integrating our Shaka player subclass is as easy as changing one line of code.
- Your app can continue interacting with the player normally, and it will keep the remote player synced up automatically.
- When you switch between foreground and background mode, the video is synchronized precisely so that the transition is seamless.
- When you use the new player, audio will play continuously from the remote player—so you won’t miss a beat when switching modes.
- If you’re not using the remote player, audio now plays as expected in foreground mode in both the simulator and on physical devices.
- Text and audio track selection is now handled automatically.
- License requests for playing protected content are also handled automatically.
The new Senza Shaka Player does all of this for you, so you don’t have to write any additional lines of code. See the Player Integration guide for more details.
Lifecycle
How do you know when to switch to background mode in your app? The client library’s new Auto Background feature can now handle that for you automatically.
- Enabling Auto Background is as simple as turning it on in the Lifecycle object.
- When the user hasn’t pressed any buttons for a period of time, it will switch to background mode automatically, saving you money.
- You can turn the feature on and off or adjust the delay whenever you need, depending upon what is happening in your app.
- If your app is playing video, it will stream the video to the remote player.
- If it’s not playing video, then it will simply freeze the last frame from the browser.
- When the user presses a button, it will switch back to foreground mode.
- The platform now streams the browser interface using variable frame rate, so it saves bandwidth if nothing is changing. It’s so smooth you won’t even notice.
The new Auto Background feature handles everything for you. See the Lifecycle Integration guide for more details.
Tutorials
The sample code and tutorials have been updated to show how you can use the new Senza Shaka Player and Auto Background interfaces.
- Playing Video — an extremely simple video player
- Program Guide — shows how to integrate an existing full-featured app with just a few lines of code
We hope you’ll find that these new developer features make it easy to take full advantage of the Senza platform.
How to Update
These new features require a client software update that will be installed automatically the next time your cloud connector starts up.
Make sure you are using the latest version of the client library. See the Installation page for details.