How can I detect buffering in AVPlayer? - ios

Question

I have a streaming video app, and I would like to know how I can detect whether the app is buffering or not.
In AVPlayer, there is the currentItem.isPlaybackLikelyToKeepUp boolean that tells you when the playback buffer is likely to keep up at the current download speed, and currentItem.isPlaybackBufferEmpty that tells you when the playback buffer is empty.
The problem occurs when the video is playing, the video pauses because the internet is too slow. If I then press the play button, the rate of the player is 1, but it is not playing.
How can I detect that the video is paused because it is buffering? currentItem.isPlaybackBufferEmpty is true even when the video is playing...
EDIT: I have combined these 2 and now the loader I show to display buffering is only shown if currentItem.isPlaybackBufferEmpty && !currentItem.isPlaybackLikelyToKeepUp, the loader now only shows a few seconds after the video starts playing.

Answer 1

This works fine for me, maybe it can help, call self?.bufferState() inside addPeriodicTimeObserver
private func bufferState() {
if let currentItem = self.avPlayer.currentItem {
if currentItem.status == AVPlayerItemStatus.readyToPlay {
if currentItem.isPlaybackLikelyToKeepUp {
print("Playing ")
} else if currentItem.isPlaybackBufferEmpty {
print("Buffer empty - show loader")
} else if currentItem.isPlaybackBufferFull {
print("Buffer full - hide loader")
} else {
print("Buffering ")
}
} else if currentItem.status == AVPlayerItemStatus.failed {
print("Failed ")
} else if currentItem.status == AVPlayerItemStatus.unknown {
print("Unknown ")
}
} else {
print("avPlayer.currentItem is nil")
}
}