AVPlayer does not start playback BufferEmpty, but does not play

Question

I use AVPlayer to play audio live over the Internet. I like to restore playback if it has been paused for more than 1 minute.

I call player.rate = 1.0 to resume. However, if a stream has been suspended for> 1 minute, it will no longer play. I need to recreate AVPlayerItem in this case so that it works again.

So, how can I catch this case, so I know that playback has not recovered?

• I tried KVO on player.rate . It stays at 1.0 . The player is not playing!
• I tried KVO on currentItem.playbackBufferEmpty . In this case, it is not called.
• currentItem.status does not switch to .Failed . It does not change at all.

In this case, AVPlayer just does nothing. Any ideas?

I am creating a site code to demonstrate the problem:

 import UIKit import AVFoundation // keep it running forever so it plays audio import XCPlayground XCPSetExecutionShouldContinueIndefinitely(true) class AVPlayerTest { let player = AVPlayer() let streamurl = NSURL(string: "http://detektor.fm/stream/mp3/musik/")! func startTest() { let item = AVPlayerItem(URL: streamurl) player.replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem(item) player.play() // give it some start time to build a buffer NSTimer.scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval(2, target: self, selector: #selector(timerTickedToPause), userInfo: nil, repeats: false) } @objc func timerTickedToPause(timer: NSTimer) { player.pause() // pause now for some time. 90s is not enough. NSTimer.scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval(120, target: self, selector: #selector(timerTickedToPlay), userInfo: nil, repeats: false) } @objc func timerTickedToPlay(timer: NSTimer) { // try to resume playback print(player.rate) player.play() print(player.rate) // check in some seconds if it recovered NSTimer.scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval(10, target: self, selector: #selector(timerTickedCheck), userInfo: nil, repeats: false) } @objc func timerTickedCheck(timer: NSTimer) { // it reports rate = 1.0 but is not playing here though! // there is no way to know for me it did not recover here!? print(player.rate) // recover by creating a new item works let item = AVPlayerItem(URL: streamurl) player.replaceCurrentItemWithPlayerItem(item) player.play() } } let test = AVPlayerTest() test.startTest()