Controlling the pre-buffering of items in the avqueueplayer

Question

Please can someone tell me if there is a way to selectively pre-buffer the avplayeritems in the AVQueuePlayer array rather than leaving it down to the AVQueuePlayer automatic way of only loading the next item in as the first item finishes playing. 

I'm loading a sequence of 4 short movie clips and I'd like to pre-cache them before telling the AVQueuePlayer to play the array. Is there actually a way of getting under the bonet of avqueueplayer and controlling the pre-buffering as desired?

Right now with its default lazy-loading behaviour, I'm getting some chugging in the playback, with the clips not even playing-out properly because the AVQueuePlayer is trying to loading-in the next clip while it's playing. I'm doing this on iPad deployed to the actual device and not with the simulator.

You can do this with the mpmovieplayer by calling [player prepareToPlay]; which basically manually initiates the loading of each video file you want and then you can check for the completeion of loading by watching for the mpmovieplayerLoadstateDidChange notification and testing the loadState value to see if it has fully loaded ,then telling the mpmovieplayer to play. How can you effectively do a similar thing with AVQueuePlayer?

Is this even possible or have I discovered one of the major drawbacks of the AVQueuePlayer?

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Nice suggestion with the playerObserver Stephen, but what is needed is something like you need to be able to explicitly get individual items to load into memory and then tell the AVQueuePlayer 'do not play the first item in the array until ALL items in the array are loaded into memory' There currently seems to be no way to start even the second item in the array loading until the first one is coming to an end!

As a slightly separate issue, I've also noticed some weirdness in the AVQueuePlayer where, if you load two of the same source video file into the array (both referenced as two completely separate AVPlayerItems as you should do) when you play the video clips in the array all the way through, the first time the clip plays through ok, but when it comes to playing that same clip again (as a separate AVPlayerItem) it plays-through very quickly until a certain point in the video then finally starts playing at normal speed from there.

Has anyone else noticed this behaviour?

Answer 1

Apple Developer Support just confirmed to me that AVQueuePlayer does not buffer video items.

Answer 2

I have the same question. I wish AV Foundation has something like asset fully loaded notification.

Following code may partially solve the problem:

Float64 durationSeconds = CMTimeGetSeconds([<#An asset#> duration]);
CMTime secondThird = CMTimeMakeWithSeconds(durationSeconds*2.0/3.0, 1);
NSArray *times = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:[NSValue valueWithCMTime:secondThird], nil];

self.playerObserver = [<#A player#> addBoundaryTimeObserverForTimes:times queue:NULL usingBlock:^{
}];