Saving buffer data of AVPlayer

Question

I am playing audio from my server using AVPlayer in my application. Now I want that when it completely buffer the audio then I can save that data in the application to play it later. So how can I access buffer data and save it for later use?

I know this is an old question. However, you can find the answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37611488/how-to-stream-a-video-with-avurlasset-and-save-to-disk-the-cached-data/37611489#37611489 — Gabriel.Massana, Jun 03 '16 at 10:08

score 40 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 21 '19 at 16:31

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You could supply a resourceLoader delegate to take over control of the resource loading process from AVPlayer and then supply it the data as and when it requests and becomes available. The resource loader is a property on AVURLAsset. I've documented a full solution on my blog but the main idea is to switch the protocol of your URL to something custom so AVURLAsset's resource loader requires your application's assistance in loading that URL. Then when you get the AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate callbacks, start downloading the file and try to respond to the pending requests received from those delegate callbacks as and when you have data. This will allow progressive loading/playback of the content without having to run a full blown HTTP server in your app or resorting to other complicated solutions.

edited Mar 21 '19 at 16:31

kelin

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answered May 20 '14 at 08:46

Anurag

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Great answer! I was about to go down the route of setting up a local http server that would somewhat act as a proxy, but this solution seems way more elegant. Will definitely give it a try. – quentinadam Aug 28 '14 at 22:51
Do you know which changes I have to make to get this working for video files? For some reason the player status changes to failure. I basically just inserted a video file instead of mp3 and added an avplayerlayer. The download starts and everything looks fine, but then the player's status changes from 0 (unknown) to 2 (failure) – Nils Ziehn Sep 09 '14 at 10:21
Nice! Have you run into the problem described here? We've got the same issue: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29683567/avplayer-stalling-on-large-video-files-using-resource-loader-delegate?lq=1 – Hudson Apr 17 '15 at 15:11
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the code works great for audio, but not for video :( – jjjjjjjj Mar 29 '16 at 00:37
I know this is an old question. However, you can find the answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37611488/how-to-stream-a-video-with-avurlasset-and-save-to-disk-the-cached-data/37611489#37611489 – Gabriel.Massana Jun 03 '16 at 10:08
Hi , Thanks for this amazing work.is there any version in Swift please , because i'm struggling to get work in Xcode with swift 4,0 – satyres Apr 19 '18 at 14:42

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 07 '16 at 22:00

The team at Calm has open-sourced our implementation to this. It's available as a CocoaPod. It's called PersistentStreamPlayer.

It acts as a resourceLoader. The big benefit over other implementations is that it does not require the binary data to be in memory at any point, so it supports larger files.

Features include:

streaming of audio file, starting playback as soon as first data is available
also saves streamed data to a file URL as soon as the buffer completes exposes timeBuffered, helpful for displaying buffer progress bars in the UI
handles re-starting the audio file after the buffer stream stalls (e.g. slow network)
simple play, pause and destroy methods (destroy clears all memory resources)
does not keep audio file data in memory, so that it supports large files that don't fit in RAM

You can find it here: https://github.com/calmcom/PersistentStreamPlayer

it mentions "Stream audio over http, and persist the data to a local file while buffering" does it work for video aswell ? — Bonnie, Oct 25 '17 at 19:44

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 10 '13 at 22:17

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Easy to do...using the same url for your audio stream use NSURLConnection to get the data and save using NSFilehandler...just done it myself whilst streaming audio and saving at the same time to mp3...let me know if you need code sample...

answered Sep 10 '13 at 22:17

Alex McPherson

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yes,sure you can share the code for others, i had done that same thing that you just explain in the Answer and its working good. – Iqbal Khan Sep 11 '13 at 06:01
Can we please see a code sample of this? Maybe a gist on Github? – user3344977 Apr 10 '15 at 06:32
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aren't you downloading the data twice by doing that? I wouldn't recommend – tomalbrc Dec 05 '16 at 01:36

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 20 '13 at 06:59

You can't access the buffer of the AVPlayer. Some hints: You can put previews (short versions of audios) of your audio files on your server, so that Your users could listen the previews before they download the full audio files, or you may search for custom open source audio stream players, maybe those will allow you to access the stream buffer. Good Luck!

Saving buffer data of AVPlayer

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