Does Looping remotely fetched video in AVPlayer cause redownload?

4
votes

I'm using a github repo to playback video on an app, specifically Player. I'm trying to better understand the code and AVFoundation in general:

  1. If I set a NSURL for the AVAssetURL with a remote server URL video and into the AVPlayer's AVPlayerItem, is it streaming the data from the remote URL? My guess is that this is true for the first play (and that it isn't downloaded all at once and then played, please correct me if I am wrong)

  2. And then if I continuously loop the video that I started playing (by setting the seekToTime to kCMTimeZero once it has ended), am I causing the AVPlayer/Asset to continuously re-stream/re-download the file every time it loops? Or is it cached until the AVPlayer/Asset is released?

If anyone could help me answer or point me to the right Apple docs, I would appreciate it! Thanks!

Another similar (?) question said AVAssetResourceDownloader, but I'm not looking to download the file to local disk (if that's what it does).

1
iosswiftavfoundationavplayer

1 Answers

2
votes
  1. You don't download the file but you fill the AVPlayer buffer (a sort of cache)
  2. If you seek to zero you don't download the files since you have the buffer.

You can compare the AVPlayer buffer to the YouTube one.