AVPlayer and Progressive Video Downloads with AVURLAssets

Question

We\'ve got an app we\'re working on that needs to provide playback of video files via AVPlayer. The files need to be stored on the user\'s device, but also must playback while d

Answer 1

I haven't a solution to just make it work wit AVURLAssets but I use a slightly different approach. We bundle our App with CocoaHTTPServer and play video files which aren't fully downloaded trough a HTTP request against the local server.

The server knows the total length of the file and can then decide by looking at the HTTP-Headers which part of the file is request and either loads it from disk or from remote source.

While developing this there where always 3 initial requests, one for the first two bytes of the file, one of a larger chunk from the beginning of the file and one chunk directly of the end of the file. That's why it was always needed to load at least the last part directly from the remote server since the player would need it right from the start. I would guess the same happens for local files so the player loads the last bytes from the file (which aren't the right last bytes) and won't play over that length.

You would have to subclass HTTPConnection and make your own HTTPResponse class by looking at the provided "HTTPAsyncFileResponse".

I hope this gives you an idea how to accomplish this with a different approach.