Play video in reverse using AVPlayer and Swift on IOS 9 - ios

Question

I have a recorded video clip that I want to play in reverse.
Playing forward is fine but as soon as I seek to the end of the video file and set the rate of playback to -1.0 the video clip seeks to the end of the clip (I see this in the timeline bar above the video) but does not play in reverse.
After I present the player view controller I check if it is ready to use:
print("readyForDisplay = \(playerViewController.readyForDisplay)")
This tells me that all is ready to prepare to play.
I check if reverse play is possible:
let reversePlay = playerViewController.player!.currentItem?.canPlayReverse
print("reversePlay = \(reversePlay)")
This returns TRUE
I then seek to the end of the clip and set the play back rate to -1.0 for reverse play.
playerViewController.player!.seekToTime(playerViewController.player!.currentItem!.asset.duration)
playerViewController.player!.rate = -1.0
I believe having got this far it is ready to play because if I add the following:
let status : AVPlayerItemStatus? = playerViewController.player!.currentItem?.status
if status == AVPlayerItemStatus.ReadyToPlay {
print("Ready to play")
}
It shows me that the clip is ready to play, so I am assuming that seeking to the end of clip (which is only 2 seconds long) has completed.
I then play the clip:
playerViewController.player!.play()
It plays fine if I don't seek to the end and attempt to change the rate to set it to reverse play.
What am I missing here?

Answer 1

I decided to add some logging after launching the video and found that the rate was -1 before launching and 1 immediately after so it seems that the rate is reset to 1.
Could this be a bug?
Anyway setting the rate immediately after the request to play the video has the desire effect.