AVPlayer seekToTime spinning pizza

Question

I have a simple AVPlayer-based OS X app that plays local media. It has a skip forward and backward feature, based on -seekToTime:. On some media, there is an annoying 3-7 second delay in getting the media to continue playing (especially going forward). I have tried - seekToTime:toleranceBefore:toleranceAfter: , with variable tolerances. No luck.

Answer 1

Posting previously solved issue for the record... I noticed that the seekToTime: skipping worked fine when the playback was paused. I immediately (i.e., several weeks later) realized that it might make sense to stop the playback before seeking, then restarting. So far, problem is 100% solved, and it is blazing fast. Might be of some use to people trying to do smooth looping (but I don't know how to trigger the completion handler signaling the end of the loop). Don't know if it works with iOS. Sample code is attached:

-(void) movePlayheadToASpecificTime
{
    // assumes this is a method for an AVPlayerView subclass, properly wired with IB
    // self.player is a property of AVPlayerView, which points to an AVPlayer

    // save the current rate
    float currentPlayingRate = self.player.rate;

    // may need fancier tweaking if the time scale changes within asset
    int32_t timeScale = self.player.currentItem.asset.duration.timescale;

    // stop playback
    self.player.rate = 0;

    Float64 desiredTimeInSeconds = 4.5; // or whatever

    // convert desired time to CMTime
    CMTime target = CMTimeMakeWithSeconds(desiredTimeInSeconds, timeScale);

    // perform the move
    [self.player seekToTime:target];

    // restore playing rate
    self.player.rate = currentPlayingRate;

}