I am using AVPlayer to stream video remotely. Whenever I scrub and use seekToTime it works, and the video plays from the location, however if I do this enough times sequentially then the completion handler of seekToTime never returns with "finished == YES" and is stuck.
Also, when profiling the connections it shows that the buffer never loads again even if seekToTime is called again after that. I can drag the scrubber to the beginning and playback will resume however it is not buffering anymore so it will get stuck in a "buffering" state once the buffer runs out but no buffer will be downloading.
Any ideas what might be wrong?
I had this problem for a long time, but also noticed that even if the seek never completed, I would quickly get a current playback position update (via the block passed to addPeriodicTimeObserverForInterval:queue:usingBlock:) that matched the target seek.
It appears, though, that I was doing some things in the wrong order when initializing the player with an item. I would set an item, and when the player's status became AVPlayerStatusReadyToPlay I would begin the seek, and it would never complete. But if I don't begin the seek until the current player item status is AVPlayerItemStatusReadyToPlay, everything works great.
The problem was with the content distribution network. The streaming url was expiring and then would no longer stream to the player
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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 used AVPlayer to play videos in slow motion. I am using addPeriodicTimeObserverForInterval: message to get time at specific interval, and checking some condition according to current playback time. once condition is fulfilled, I am calculating rate and using setRate: message of AVPlayer. i.e I am setting rate frequently. but once I have done with this, video is not playing smoothly, it's glitchy.
Can anybody please let me know how can I set setRate: frequently.
Thanks
We were having kind of the same issue. We were using setRate:1 (or 1.5/2.0 depending on what the user chose) to play the video instead of calling play. We have changed to call play then setRate: and the video plays smoothly now.
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.
Is it possible, using javascript, to detect if an embedded youtube video pauses playback in order to let the video buffer? I know that there are events that fire when the user presses pause, but I'm looking for an event that fires when the video pauses due to a slow connection. I'm creating a web application where it's important to have the video play through smoothly. If the video pauses due to a slow connection, I want to detect that.
Use this code player.getPlayerState():Number it seems like you are allowed to ask the player what status it is in so this may help you
https://developers.google.com/youtube/js_api_reference
There is also a state 'buffering' being fired when the player needs to buffer more data..in that case the video stops. I guess also 'error' state might be of help.
The solution I worked out is just to use the javascript API's onStateChange callback (https://developers.google.com/youtube/js_api_reference) to detect when the player is started for the first time and when it finishes playing at the end. When the player is started, I grab the current time. When it finishes, it sees how much time has elapsed. In my application, the user cannot pause the video, so comparing the elapsed time to the video length indicates if it paused for loading.
I think we all run into this as a user as well. For example, when I'm playing a Youtube video, and the connection is slow, it will not play until enough content has been buffered. But sometimes even after the content arrived it won't resume playing.
Most of the times when this happens I just click once somewhere on the player bar and it will resume.
Now, I think I've run into this situation while programming with HTML5 Audio elements and Youtube APIs. Most of the times they work well, but when the connection is spotty, it will just stop and never resume even after content has arrived. Is there a way to get around this problem? Thank you!
HTML5 Media Elements trigger a lot of useful events that might help you solve this problem. I would consider starting a timer when the waiting event fires (which indicates buffering) then periodically attempt to resume playing the track until canplay fires.
You could also call load instead of play then wait for canplaythrough fires (which indicates that media can play continuously without needing to pause for buffering).
Of course it's possible that the YouTube API prevents these events from propagating to the containing page, but it's worth a try.