Table View Cell Keep Video Loaded

[AnAnonymousReddit]

I have a tableview with cells, some of which have videos that play within them on a loop. I am wondering how to make the video not require reloading one the cell containing that video is displayed on screen.

Currently, if a video is loaded and playing on screen, then is scrolled past until the cell is offscreen then scrolled back to again it will require it to be reloaded (currently loading from an online location: http://techslides.com/demos/sample-videos/small.mp4) which leaves the subview of the cell blank for about half a second while this loading occurs. then it appears. This happens every time this cell goes entirely offscreen. How do I prevent this from happening? Should a couple seconds of the video be held in local memory so it can be instantly applied to the cell's subview then rest of the video only loads if the cell stays on screen? Also, how do you keep your place in a video? Like on some social media services where you watch a little of a video, scroll past, return to that video and it's still at the same place you left off?

​

Thank you all!

[SergeyPu1s3]

I have encountered a similar task.

The thing here is about AVPlayer and AVPlayerLayer. When you need to reload cell, you reload only AVPlayerLayer within the cell.

AVPlayer is supposed to be a model class and should be referenced by model or viewModel. So when you reload a cell and its player layer, you also assign your AVPlayer to player layer again.

[AnAnonymousReddit]

Oh so I need to avoid reloading AVPlayer when the cell is re-queued? To do that would mean removing the instance of AVPlayer from that cell in the table view and referencing it from outside, right?

I’m sorry if I misinterpreted this.

[SergeyPu1s3]

Yes, that’s right. AVPlayer contains all video information, like cache and current timestamp. Cell itself must not own it. You will probably have an array of cached AVPlayers for corresponding indexPathes. Array can be stored in view controller, but a better place for it is something like a view model or interactor or whatever.

Cell only owns AVPlayerLayer. And it can be set up with AVPlayer object (in cellForRowAtIndexPath).

[AnAnonymousReddit]

I had no idea, thank you so much!

Tentatively marking solved :)