Looping AVPlayer seamlessly

Question

There has been some discussion before about how to loop an AVPlayer\'s video item, but no \'solution\' is seamless enough to provide lag-less l

Answer 1

I had the same problem when streaming a video. After playing for the first time, there was a black screen when loading the video for second time. I got rid of the black screen by seeking video to 5ms ahead. It made nearly a seamless video loop. (Swift 2.1)

// Create player here..
let player = AVPlayer(URL: videoURL)

// Add notification block
NSNotificationCenter.defaultCenter().addObserverForName(AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTimeNotification, object: player.currentItem, queue: nil)
{ notification in
   let t1 = CMTimeMake(5, 100);
   player.seekToTime(t1)
   player.play()
}

Answer 2

You mention that you looked at AVAnimator, but did you see my blog post on this specific subject of seamless looping? I specifically built seamless looping logic in because it could not be done properly with AVPlayer and the H.264 hardware.

Answer 3

I use two AVPlayerItems with the same AVAsset in an AVQueuePlayer and switch the items:

 weak var w = self
 NSNotificationCenter.defaultCenter().addObserverForName(AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTimeNotification, object: nil, queue: nil) { (notification) -> Void in
        let queuePlayer = w!.playerController.player! as! AVQueuePlayer
        if(queuePlayer.currentItem == playerItem1) {
            queuePlayer.insertItem(playerItem2, afterItem: nil)
            playerItem1.seekToTime(kCMTimeZero)
        } else {
            queuePlayer.insertItem(playerItem1, afterItem: nil)
            playerItem2.seekToTime(kCMTimeZero)
        }
    }

Answer 4

If the video is very short (a few seconds), you can probably extract each frame as CGImage and use CAKeyframeAnimation to animate it. I am using this technique to play GIF images on my app and the animation is very smooth.