Changing playerItem of AVPlayer in UITableView

Question

I have a UITableView containing a number of videos to play when scrolling. As the cells in the tableView are being re-used, I only instantiate one AVPlaye

Answer 1

If you do some basic level of profiling, I think you can narrow down the problem. For me, I had a similar issue where replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem was blocking the UI thread. I resolved it by examining my code to find out which line was taking time. For me the AVAsset loading was taking time. So I used the loadValuesAsynchronouslyForKeys method of AVAsset to resolve my issue.

Hence can you try the following:

-(void)initializeNewObject:(CustomObject*)o
{
    //If this cell is being dequeued/re-used, its player might still be playing the old file
    [self.player pause];
    self.currentObject = o;
    /*
    //Setting text-variables for title etc. Removed from this post, but by commenting them out in the code, nothing improves.
    */

    //Replace the old playerItem in the cell's player
    NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:self.currentObject.url];
    AVAsset *newAsset = [AVAsset assetWithURL:url];
    [newAsset loadValuesAsynchronouslyForKeys:@[@"duration"] completionHandler:^{
        AVPlayerItem *newItem = [AVPlayerItem playerItemWithAsset:newAsset];
        [self.player replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem:newItem];
    }];


    //The last line above, replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem:, is the 'bad guy'.
    //When commenting that one out, all lag is gone (of course, no videos will be playing either)
    //The lag still occurs even if I never call [self.player play], which leads me
    //to believe that nothing after this function can cause the lag

    self.isPlaying = NO;
}