AVPlayerItem replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem Blocking

Question

First a little context about the application...
- There\'s a lot of heavy UI operation\'s involving video players (mostly scrolling)
- The videos are dynamic and c

Answer 1

We had the same problem when building Ultravisual. I can't exactly remember how we solved it, but IIRC it involved doing as much of the item setup as possible on a background thread, and waiting until the new item reports that it is 'ready to play' before calling replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem.

Sadly this involves a voodoo dance with somewhat inconsistent asynchronous KVO, which is no fun.

Answer 2

The solution I found was to ensure that the underlying AVAsset is ready to return basic info, such as its duration, before feeding it to the AVPlayer. AVAsset has a method loadValuesAsynchronouslyForKeys: which is handy for this:

AVAsset *asset = [AVAsset assetWithURL:self.mediaURL];
[asset loadValuesAsynchronouslyForKeys:@[@"duration"] completionHandler:^{
    AVPlayerItem *newItem = [[AVPlayerItem alloc] initWithAsset:asset];
    [self.avPlayer replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem:newItem];
}];

In my case the URL is a network resource, and replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem: will actually block for several seconds waiting for this information to download otherwise.