This one was absolutely killing me until I figured it out, picking up clues from this thread and a few others. The biggest single problem in my code was that I was instantiating my video player controller every time I wanted to play a video. Now, it gets instantiated once in the primary controller (in this case, my DetailViewContoller):
@interface DetailViewController () {
VideoPlayerViewController *videoPlayerViewController;
}
- (void) viewDidLoad
{
[super viewDidLoad];
videoPlayerViewController = [[VideoPlayerViewController alloc] initWithNibName: nil bundle: nil];
}
When I want to show a video, I call my DetailViewController's startVideoPlayback method:
- (void) startVideoPlayback: (NSString *)videoUID
{
videoPlayerViewController.videoUID = videoUID;
[self presentModalViewController: videoPlayerViewController animated: YES];
}
(NOTE: I'm passing it 'videoUID' -- a unique identified that was used to create the video in another part of the app.)
In the VideoPlayerViewController (which is largely cribbed from Apple's AVPlayerDemo sample), the one-time screen setup (initializing the AVPlayer, setting up the toolbar, etc.) is done in viewDidLoad -- which now only get's called once, and all per-video setup gets done within viewWillAppear, which then calls prepareToPlay:
- (void) prepareToPlay
{
[self initScrubberTimer];
[self syncPlayPauseButtons];
[self syncScrubber];
NSString *documentsDirectory = [NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex:0];
//*** Retrieve and play video at associated with this videoUID
NSString *destinationPath = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingFormat: @"/%@.mov", videoUID];
if ([self fileExists: destinationPath]) {
//*** Show the activity indicator spinny thing
[pleaseWait startAnimating];
[self setURL: [NSURL fileURLWithPath: destinationPath]];
//*** Get things going with the first video in this session
if (isFirst) {
isFirst = NO;
//*** Subseqeunt videos replace the first one
} else {
[self.mPlayer replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem: [AVPlayerItem playerItemWithURL: [NSURL fileURLWithPath: destinationPath]]];
}
}
}
