AirPlay with multiple instances of AVPlayer

Question

In my app, I have multiple tabs and on each tab I have an instance of AVPlayer. When I activate AirPlay, however, "the first player wins". That means that the player on the currently active tab connects to AirPlay and when I switch to a different tab and press play, nothing happens. So only the first instance of AVPlayer that connects to AirPlay can actually play through AirPlay and no players on the other tabs work. What to do?

Out of curiosity, why not use the singleton pattern for your AVPlayer? — Marco, Nov 05 '13 at 22:17
@Marco: That is one possibility, but I'd rather not have to "manually" remember and restore the state of each player on each tab, but have separate players that do that for me. — Johannes Fahrenkrug, Nov 06 '13 at 13:33

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 05 '13 at 20:05

The solution is quite easy: When your view controller that contains a player appears, you set allowsExternalPlayback on the AVPlayer instance to YES, when in disappears you set it to NO.

Example:

- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated
{
    // _player is an instance of AVPlayer
    if ([_player respondsToSelector:@selector(setAllowsExternalPlayback:)]) {
        // iOS 6+
        _player.allowsExternalPlayback = YES;
    } else {
        // iOS 5
        _player.allowsAirPlayVideo = YES;
    }

    [super viewWillAppear:animated];
}

- (void)viewWillDisappear:(BOOL)animated
{
    // _player is an instance of AVPlayer
    if ([_player respondsToSelector:@selector(setAllowsExternalPlayback:)]) {
        // iOS 6+
        _player.allowsExternalPlayback = NO;
    } else {
        // iOS 5
        _player.allowsAirPlayVideo = NO;
    }

    [super viewWillDisappear:animated];
}

Enjoy.

AirPlay with multiple instances of AVPlayer

1 Answers1