How to check status of AVPlayer? - ios

Question

I thought that I could check the status of an AVPlayer simply by the property "rate".
This is how I create a player instance:
player = AVPlayer(URL: stream) // streaming from the internet
player!.play()
At some later point I would do something like this
println(player!.rate)
This is what I discovered:
In Simulator I get "0.0" in case the player is not running or "1.0" if it is running.
If I start the player but interrupt the internet connection it changes values from 1 to 0.
However, on my iPhone the property keeps value 1 even if I enter Airplane Mode?!
Do you have any idea why that happens and how I could check the stream condition otherwise?
I have tried an observer so far:
player!.addObserver(self, forKeyPath: "status", options: NSKeyValueObservingOptions.New, context: nil)
But even the method "observeValueForKeyPath" does not get fired in my iPhone test case.

Answer 1

Check out the Apple docs here
and scroll to the "Key-Value Observing" section. Especially #3 in that section.
It helped me get my implementation to work. My resulting code looks like this:
//Global
var player = AVPlayer()
func setUpPlayer() {
//...
// Setting up your player code goes here
self.player.addObserver(self, forKeyPath: "status", options: NSKeyValueObservingOptions(), context: nil)
//...
}
// catch changes to status
override func observeValueForKeyPath(keyPath: String?, ofObject object: AnyObject?, change: [String : AnyObject]?, context: UnsafeMutablePointer<Void>) {
print("obsrved")
}

Answer 2

I could not make it work with adding an observer on the currentItem as user #gabbler suggested.
However it helped using the notification center like this:
NSNotificationCenter.defaultCenter().addObserverForName(
AVPlayerItemFailedToPlayToEndTimeNotification,
object: nil,
queue: nil,
usingBlock: { notification in
self.stop()
})
Note that stop() is a method in the same class which stops the stream as if a stop button were clicked.