vinodiOS/CachingPlayerItem

An AVPlayerItem subclass that lets you stream and cache media content on iOS

CachingPlayerItem

CachingPlayerItem is a subclass of AVPlayerItem that lets you stream and cache media content on iOS. Initial idea for this work was found here.

Features

• Playing and caching remote media
• Downloaded data is buffered and stored on a file, therefore you won't have any RAM memory issues
• Playing from a local file / data
• Convenient notifications through CachingPlayerItemDelegate delegate
• CachingPlayerItem is a subclass of AVPlayerItem, so you can use it in the same manner as AVPlayerItem and take the full advantage of AVFoundation Framework
• Configurable downloadBufferLimit / readDataLimit through CachingPlayerItemConfiguration
• Play remote media without caching and still make use of CachingPlayerItemDelegate
• Complete Documentation

Requirements

• iOS 10.0+
• Xcode 12.0+
• Swift 5.0+

Installation

CocoaPods

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for Cocoa projects. You can install it with the following command:

$ gem install cocoapods

To integrate CachingPlayerItem into your Xcode project using CocoaPods, specify it in your Podfile:

source 'https://github.com/CocoaPods/Specs.git'
platform :ios, '10.0'
use_frameworks!

target '<Your Target Name>' do
    pod 'CachingPlayerItem'
end

Swift Package Manager

The Swift Package Manager is a tool for automating the distribution of Swift code and is integrated into the swift compiler.

Once you have your Swift package set up, adding CachingPlayerItem as a dependency is as easy as adding it to the dependencies value of your Package.swift.

dependencies: [
    .package(url: "https://github.com/sukov/CachingPlayerItem.git", from: "1.0.5")
]

Usage

Quick Start

import UIKit
import AVFoundation
import CachingPlayerItem

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    // You need to keep a strong reference to your player.
    var player: AVPlayer!
    
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
     
        let url = URL(string: "https://random-url.com/video.mp4")!
        let playerItem = CachingPlayerItem(url: url)
        player = AVPlayer(playerItem: playerItem)
        player.automaticallyWaitsToMinimizeStalling = false
        player.play()
        
    }
}

From Apple docs: It's strongly recommended to set AVPlayer's property automaticallyWaitsToMinimizeStalling to false. Not doing so can lead to poor startup times for playback and poor recovery from stalls.

If you want to cache a file without playing it, or to preload it for future playing, use download() method:

let playerItem = CachingPlayerItem(url: videoURL)
playerItem.download()

It's fine to start playing the item while it's being downloaded.

CachingPlayerItemDelegate protocol

Note: All of the methods are optional.

@objc public protocol CachingPlayerItemDelegate {
    // MARK: Downloading delegate methods

    /// Called when the media file is fully downloaded.
    @objc optional func playerItem(_ playerItem: CachingPlayerItem, didFinishDownloadingFileAt filePath: String)

    /// Called every time a new portion of data is received.
    @objc optional func playerItem(_ playerItem: CachingPlayerItem, didDownloadBytesSoFar bytesDownloaded: Int, outOf bytesExpected: Int)

    /// Called on downloading error.
    @objc optional func playerItem(_ playerItem: CachingPlayerItem, downloadingFailedWith error: Error)

    // MARK: Playing delegate methods

    /// Called after initial prebuffering is finished, means we are ready to play.
    @objc optional func playerItemReadyToPlay(_ playerItem: CachingPlayerItem)

    /// Called when the player is unable to play the data/url.
    @objc optional func playerItemDidFailToPlay(_ playerItem: CachingPlayerItem, withError error: Error?)

    /// Called when the data being downloaded did not arrive in time to continue playback.
    @objc optional func playerItemPlaybackStalled(_ playerItem: CachingPlayerItem)
}

Important: You are in charge for managing the downloaded local media files. In case you used an initializer that generates the filePath randomly, you will be able to retrieve it in didFinishDownloadingFileAt delegate method.

Example

To run the example project, clone the repo, and run pod install from the Example directory first.

Author

sukov, gorjan5@hotmail.com

License

CachingPlayerItem is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.

Known limitations

• CachingPlayerItem loads its content sequentially. If you seek to yet not downloaded portion, it waits until data previous to this position is downloaded, and only then starts the playback.
• URL's must contain a file extension for the player to load properly. To get around this, a custom file extension can be specified e.g. let playerItem = CachingPlayerItem(url: url, customFileExtension: "mp3").