AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate methods not working on device

Question

I have been working on a simple AVPlayer to play encrypted HLS media.

I am using the AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate to handle the key retrieving process so the encrypted media can be played with a valid key.

The program works perfectly on simulator, but it doesn't work at all on device.

Here are the codes:

- (void) playUrlByAVPlayer:(NSString *) videoUrl
{
    NSURL *streamURL = [NSURL URLWithString:videoUrl];

    AVURLAsset *asset = [AVURLAsset URLAssetWithURL:streamURL options:nil];

    [asset.resourceLoader setDelegate:self queue:dispatch_get_main_queue()];

    self.playerItem = [AVPlayerItem playerItemWithAsset:asset];                           
    self.player = [AVPlayer playerWithPlayerItem:self.playerItem];

    self.playerLayer = [AVPlayerLayer playerLayerWithPlayer:self.player];
    [self.playerLayer setFrame:self.view.frame];
    [self.view.layer addSublayer:self.playerLayer];

    [self.player play];
}

After some debugging, I realized that the delegate method shouldWaitForLoadingOfRequestedResource was never called on device.

I have read other relevant questions:

AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate not being called

AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate - Only requests first two bytes?

and I tried enclosing all codes within a dispatch_async, dispatch_get_main_queue block but there's no luck on solving mine.

Currently my codes above are not enclosed by any dispatch queue blocks.

Any thoughts on the problem?

Answer 1

If you take a look on Apple example code where they show bipbop.m3u8 HLS playback you will see that they are using masks for real http requests: "http:/host/bipbop.m3u8" => "custom_scheme:/host/bipbop.m3u8" Same trick should be made with playlist subresources.

Otherwise avplayer ignores AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate and load data directly.

You need to implement some kind of mapping:

NSString* videoUrl = @"fake_scheme://host/video.m3u8";
NSURL *streamURL = [NSURL URLWithString:videoUrl];

Answer 2

As I mentioned in the other thread as well, AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate works only when we use a "Non Standard/Non Reserved" url scheme. HTTP, HTTPS etc are considered reserved URL schemes and iOS will not make a delegate call if the URL has one of those schemes. What I ended up doing was using my_own_http for the http urls and my_own_https for the https urls. It works well after I made that change. As you know this makes your playlist unusable on other deices.

Answer 3

In your delegate shouldWaitForLoadingOfRequestedResource change the URL scheme back to http:

NSURLComponents *urlComponents = [NSURLComponents componentsWithURL:loadingRequest.request.URL resolvingAgainstBaseURL:NO];
    urlComponents.scheme = @"http";
NSMutableURLRequest *mutableLoadingRequest = [loadingRequest.request mutableCopy];
[mutableLoadingRequest setURL:urlComponents.URL];