So I have an app built with a player that plays a video, I have a [player pause] and [player play] in the didBecomeActive and willResignActive methods. Most of the time works fine, but when I open the app, and press the home button and repeat again that process, around the 8th time the video will not play even though I see the play method getting called.
Does anyone have any idea what might be going on?
The app can be in several states that are not foreground. Before playing, check to see if you still have a player, that it still has a player.currentItem, and if it's status is AVPlayerStatusReadyToPlay.
If any of those conditions are not met, then the player and the item must be reinitialized using the code that you used to create it in the first place.
This is a good candidate for a lazy initializer for your player property.
Related
I have an application that plays video using AVPlayer and AVPlayerLayer. In my app, I'm able to play audio when the app is locked by setting the player property of my AVPlayerLayer to nil when the application enters the background:
-(void)appEnteredBackgroundNotification:(NSNotification *)notification {
[[self playerLayer] setPlayer:nil];
}
However, when I do this, the audio will lag/blip for around 0.5 seconds. This sounds really really bad for the end user. Same goes for when the app enters foreground and I re-set the player property.
How can I avoid this audio blip? As a test I've tried removing the player in a background thread to no avail.
Update: I spoke with an Apple engineer at WWDC and they said that this issue is a bug on their end (so far not fixed in iOS 9) and this approach is the correct approach. Great...
I think may not you call pause before setting to nil and vice versa. And, try calling prepare before play.
I have an app that uses AVPlayer (or AVQueuePLayer) to play local files that were recorded by the App. All works great. But I also want this to work on iPhone when a call is in progress (the videos are event recordings). What I found is that during a phone call, the video feed to avplayerLayer goes blank, AVPlayer rate change to 0 (STOP), and all attempts to change rate to non-zero (PLAY) are ignored (rate stays at 0). There does not appear to be any documentation on this, and the only way to detect this condition in the player, is that player is STOPPED and will not start PLAYBACK. Of course, I also check for audio interruptions, and call center calls in progress.
Obviously, in this case the interruption is caused by a call, so there is always a inactive/resume or a intactive/background/foreground/resume transition. As well as audio route notification, audio interruption. So indirectly I know the condition is probably occurring.
So questions are:
(1) Is there any direct method (specific to AVPlayer,AVPlayerLayer) to be notified that AVPlayer is in this non-playing mode. I now use "avplayer.rate failed to change rate from 0 to non-zero", but this seems hacky (and too much "crossing the streams"!) I want to Notify user that video temporarily can not be played or previewed, so they do not think the App is broken. And also inform them or automatically continue Playback when iPhone call ends. (Without a looping process that keeps trying to start playback every 500ms!)
(2) Can AVPlayer play anything while a iPhone call (Green Bar) is in progress? or is this just the way apple designed the AVPlayer SDK? (If so there is no documentation on this) Obviously, other apps can play video during an iPhone call, but I suspect they are using a lower level SDK and not AVPlayer.
I have an AVQueuePlayer which loads URLs to play audio files and it works well for the most part. However, I have run into a problem where after the player finishes playing a file (with another file in the queue), it will simply stop playing. Normally, the app would be able to use the player's rate, status, and items. In this case, I have gone through with the debugger and everything looks normal.
Everything appears to be playing, except for the player itself. After forcing the player to play, the player will skip to the next track, indicating that the AVPlayerItem it had was not loaded (I can confirm the audio urls are valid).
Does anyone have any ideas how I catch this programatically?
You need to have the delegate method:
- (void)audioPlayerDidFinishPlaying:(AVAudioPlayer *)player successfully:(BOOL)flag;
Once this method is finished, start the new audio.
I want to show the play icon on status bar in iOS while app is playing audio. I use AVQueuePlayer to play audio items. All works well but problem I am facing is play icon doesn't show on status bar sometimes.
The app has to support play/pause. When user taps on pause, I pause the queue player and tapping on play button will start playing the queue again. When user taps on play again, I do seeking of the player item so that it will be in sync with what it is supposed to be played at that time. But some times after tapping on play again, the queue seeks to proper time and plays but play icon doesn't show up in the status bar.
I tried by commenting out the seek code and just did play/pause. The play icon shows/hides correctly, but I am not sure what is happening with seekTime API. If I use this to seek, sometimes the icon doesn't show time.
Is this something issue happening in seekTime: API? I am using the following code for seek
[self.player.currentItem seekToTime:seekTime];
Please help me on this issue.
Thanks
I don't use AVQueuePlayer but I had a similar problem. I'm using AVAudioPlayer only and when the application starts I play an audio which is then repeated constantly. For some reason, at different times, the play icon disappears but the audio is still playing.
My solution was to apply the response of "One Man Crew" in How to display playing indication icon on status bar?
But, in addition, every time I play again, I use the following:
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] beginReceivingRemoteControlEvents];
[self becomeFirstResponder];
I don't know if it is correct, I am new in ios development, but currently is working to me.
Please let me know if there is a better solution.
Diego.
I have a bit of a strange problem. I have a music app that uses the [MPMusicPlayerController iPodMusicPlayer]. Everything is fine, notifications are fired for track changes and changes in playback state.
I have one screen where the user needs to review one single song, I don't want him to go on to the next song in his queue. Since there is no delegate method for when a track WILL change (only DID change), to prevent the music player from continuing to the next track I use a new [MPMusicPlayerController applicationMusicPlayer], give it iPodMusicPlayer's currently playing song and all is well. No new tracks to continue to, and I'm not touching the original iPodMusicPlayer queue so in theory, when I close this screen and use the iPodMusicPlayer again, all should be perfectly fine.
However, when the user is done on this screen and closes it, iPodMusicPlayer is now suddenly broken, notifications are not called and when I put the app to the background, music stops playing, causing me to believe that iPodMusicPlayer is now actually applicationMusicPlayer.
Okay so my question is basically: I need a way to prevent the music player to continue on to the next track in the queue. Switching to applicationMusicPlayer with one track seems to break stuff, as explained above. What's the best solution?
EDIT: because this might be a bit difficult to understand, I created a small project to show the problem: https://github.com/kevinrenskers/MPMusicPlayerControllerTest. Open the app while music is playing, see that the play button behaves correctly. Now open the popup, close it again and the play button is broken.
I found a solution to my problem: set the repeatMode to MPMusicRepeatModeOne and then catch the MPMusicPlayerControllerNowPlayingItemDidChangeNotification notification. You can stop the playback and you never continue to the next track. Once I'm done with the second screen I reset the repeatMode to the original value.