Pre-buffering for AVQueuePlayer

iphone objective-c avfoundation avplayer
Mihai Damian picture Mihai Damian · Nov 18, 2010 · Viewed 13.1k times · Source

Does anyone know if AVQueuePlayer starts buffering the next AVPlayerItem when the current item is about to finish playing?

I know there's nothing in the docs to suggest this, I'm asking mostly if anyone has observed this kind of behavior or not.

Answer

Mihai Damian picture Mihai Damian · Jan 7, 2011

Ok, I've looked over this problem again and written some code to check out AVQueuePlayer.

jollyCocoa's answer pointed me in the right direction by suggesting to observe the status property on AVPlayerItem. However the documentation doesn't seem to point out that this property (and it's AVPlayerItemStatusReadyToPlay value in particular) might be related to buffering.

However the AVPlayerItem's loadedTimeRanges property seems more related to buffering.

Doing KVO on that array was a bit trickier - the array object itself doesn't change, only it's items do - so I resorted to printing out it's content every second.

What I found out is that a few seconds in the queue's first item, the loadedTimeRanges for the second item shows up a new CMTimeRange with start time 0 and some small duration. The duration can increase up to 60 or so seconds while the previous item keeps playing.

Short answer: AVQueuePlayer will buffer the next AVPlayerItem while playing the current one.

Related questions

Check play state of AVPlayer

Is there a way to know whether an AVPlayer playback has stalled or reached the end?

Read More
ios capturing image using AVFramework

I'm capturing images using this code #pragma mark - image capture // Create and configure a capture session and start it running - (void)setupCaptureSession { NSError *error = nil; // Create the session AVCaptureSession *session = [[AVCaptureSession alloc] init]; // Configure the session to produce …

Read More
iOS - Scale and crop CMSampleBufferRef/CVImageBufferRef

I am using AVFoundation and getting the sample buffer from AVCaptureVideoDataOutput, I can write it directly to videoWriter by using: - (void)writeBufferFrame:(CMSampleBufferRef)sampleBuffer { CMTime lastSampleTime = CMSampleBufferGetPresentationTimeStamp(sampleBuffer); if(self.videoWriter.status != AVAssetWriterStatusWriting) { [self.videoWriter startWriting]; [self.videoWriter startSessionAtSourceTime:…

Read More