iOS AVPlayer won't play audiobook but MPPLayerController will

Question

I'm developing a podcast/audiobook application. AVPlayer is working great for playing podcasts but won't play audiobook from audible.com. It will play audible files in MPMusicPlayer. Is that b/c of proprietary format? I'm just trying to figure out if I need to totally refactor my app to use mpmusicplayer or use both players by audio type. THanks! This forum has been so helpful!!

Answer 1

The AV--- classes are lower-level. There are a lot of things handled automatically by the MP--- classes that you have to do yourself when you use classes from AVFoundation.

In my projects, I use the MPMoviePlayerController and related classes instead of using the AVFoundation classes, whenever I can. Saves me a lot of time. Only when the project requirements can't be handled by the MediaPlayer framework do I use the AVFoundation classes.

In this specific case of audio books from Audible, it's likely that there's some encryption on the book or the connection that is being handled by the MediaPlayer framework.