Memory leak in iOS, AVPlayer is never deallocated

Question

I used the AVPlayerDemo sample from the Apple docs and wrote my own UI on top of it to play videos selected from a UITableViewController. Now, the problem is that there's a memory leak here somewhere which I can't find out. The problem is that the AVPlayer object is not being dealloced, I guessed this because every time a press back button and select a new video to play, there is a huge jump in the total memory consumed by the app which is show here:

The first time the video is player, the memory usage is 36.6MB, now for the second time:

Here it has jumped to 58.2MB, and keeps on increasing every time i go back and play the video again or a different video.

I have tried using Instruments with Leaks but haven't yet been able to figure out whats wrong with it.

Heres the whole Controller file code.

//EDIT

-(void) viewWillDisappear:(BOOL)animated{
    [super viewWillDisappear:animated];

    if(_player.rate == 1.0){
        [_player pause];
    }

    [idleTimer invalidate];

    if(mTimeObserver){
        [_player removeTimeObserver:mTimeObserver];
        mTimeObserver = nil;
    }
    [_playerItem removeObserver:self forKeyPath:kStatusKeyT];
    [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self                                                 name:AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTimeNotification object:_playerItem];


    _player = nil;
    _playerItem = nil;
    idleTimer = nil;
    _tapGestureRecognizer = nil;
}

-(void) dealloc
{
    NSLog(@"DEALLOCING");
}

Answer 1

I had the same issue as you, but I managed to fix the memory leak by calling this on viewDidDisappear:

self.avPlayer?.replaceCurrentItem(with: nil)