I have a list of videos in my iOS app, which I fetch from my API. The list contains video nodes with an mp4 video file url on the server, and as the user scrolls from one video to the next, the next video starts and the earlier video pauses. This all works well, but I need a way to cache mp4 videos to disk, in such a way that when the user tries to seek, I first try serving the sought chunk from my disk cache, and if this is not cached already, I start loading the chunk from the network, and then the chunks are cached to disk while being played. I also need a way to pre cache the next videos, for example if the user starts playing first video, I need to be able to start caching the second video, so that when the second video starts playing, it does so from the cache, to the point upto which the video is cached, and then seamlessly hop to fetching from the server (and of course caching the responses). How do I go about this?
There's no automated way to do this built into the framework. You'll use background NSURLSessions with download tasks and delegate methods.
You can monitor the progress of the downloads, access the temporary files while they download, pause, resume, and cancel them.
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Currently in our iOS Application, we are downloading the video and then playing it, which is indeed taking a lot of time and killing the user experience. Now, we want to shift to directly stream the video or play the video while it is downloading.
I have tried using AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate. I doesn't play the video at all and displays the mime type as text/html. Maybe because I am loading from a secured URL with headers.
Can someone suggest me a good way where I can stream or Play the video while downloading it. Would be glad if someone suggest a way to Stream the video's directly from the URL.
I use AVPlayer to play .MOV videos stored on my dedicated server.
When an user wants to play a video, i load it on AVPlayer using a direct link like this : "wwww.myserver.com/videos/video.mov".
(I don't use php file, maybe i should..)
Generally videos take 1-2 seconds to start playing, but sometimes it can be very slow(until 1 minutes)
However, once the video started, the loading is very quick, but the start can be long, very long (even with fast connection).
Videos are small (maximum 6Mo), i compressed them using SDAVAssetExportSession.
Also I've disabled App Transport Security.
The issue can be server side ? i really don't know how solve this problem
Any help is appreciated
edit 1 : link to video on my server
Here's the needs: People record their video via my App and upload stream to our website, you know, like a live show.
When they are recording, the network goes bad, then record audio instead of video.
And when audience watch, first comes the video, in a certain time comes the audio with a static picture.
How am I supposed to do that? Thanks.
I got this after thinking. So I'll answer by my self.
If you wanna record video and audio separately. Use lower level Library to handle this. Then upload it. And you can get the upload speed, When the speed goes low, you can shut down the video upload process.
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 downloading.
At the moment we've built a download module that uses the ASIHTTPRequest library to get the video files via PHP (we don't want the media to be linkable via public URLs) and write them to disk asynchronously.
We've then setup an AVPlayer as per the AV Foundation Programming Guide, getting the file with AVURLAsset, making an AVPlayerItem with the asset, building the AVPlayer with the item, then setting the player to an AVPlayerLayer. The player runs fine with a fully downloaded video file and will also run a progressively downloaded file perfectly well in the simulator.
Unfortunately on an actual device, the behavior of the player changes, where instead it seemingly loads the video once and doesn't attempt to grab new packets from disk. The result is that the player will play video and audio up to the point in the video that marks where the download progress was at the time the asset was loaded (e.g. if 2MB of data are buffered then the player is created, the player will only play up to the 2MB worth of data). Because it has the video's header, the player will happily continue thinking it's playing for the full duration of the video, but no other video is rendered to screen.
The last wrinkle is that if the video is inserted into an AVComposition and the AVPlayer is created with that, the progressive video will play fine. This would be a fine solution (and is necessary for our app anyway on occasion) except that the client for our app requires that the video be playable on an Apple TV via AirPlay, which AVCompositions are incapable of.
Does anyone know if there is a way to play progressively downloading video files using an AVPlayer built from AVURLAssets? Is there a way to force the player/playerItem to read from disk with an AVURLAsset the way it seems to do with an AVComposition instead of seemingly caching the video in memory?
Thanks!
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.
I am trying to get the MPMovieplayerController to play incomplete video files. I want to use this so a user can download a part of a movie and play it offline. I am using ASIHTTP so i can resume downloads, if i try to play the temporary the player does nothing and and i get no errors. Also i registered for the MPMoviePlayerContentPreloadDidFinishNotification notification but it does not get dispatched. When the file is done downloading i can play it correctly.
Is it possible to somehow play incomplete video files? Alternatives to MPMovieplayerController are also welcome if that offers a solution.
I needed to download the first part op the mp4 file and the last part before i was able to play the video. So i am now downloading the first mb of the file then the last mb then the middle part and now i can play the file while it is not complete.