Playing Online Audio in iOS

Though we are talking about using AVPlayer（iOS） for playing online audio here, I found that if the server-side has the wrong configuration, Android might have the same problem, too.

Using AVPlayer to play online-audio

That is very convenience to use AVPlayer or AVAudioPlayer to play audio, and AVAudioPlayer only for local-file-audio which is suck. Because AVAudioPlayer really has more friendly API & delagates.

Init your player like this

	NSURL *URL = ...
    self.player = [AVPlayer playerWithURL:URL];
    [self.player play];

Add observer for finish callback

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self 
                                         selector:@selector(audioDidFinishPlaying:) 
                                             name:AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTimeNotification 
                                           object:self.player.currentItem];

Here comes the problem

If server add gzip to response header, AVPlayer will play the audio as Live Boardcast, which means you won’t get any notification callback for AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTimeNotification & keep looping the audio.

What’s worse, gzip might cause the AVPlayer mis-calculate the real duration of the audio even though it’s looping. You will get 0 from duration-api & the audio may restart from the beginning when it’s 80% of the real-duration.