I have an app that uses AVPlayer to play live streams and on-demand video. That in-house app (and recent in-house update) plays video beautifully in all sorts of conditions. Until a user in the company updated to iOS 13.
The same app run under iOS 12 from the same location will work perfect as before.
Now, after a reboot of the phone the first video played will play perfect and if it is a live stream will run for an indefinite amount of time without trouble. The second video played will always play audio only or fail depending on the bit rates available for the video. Even the exact same video.
Quiting and restarting the app makes no difference in the results. Restarting the phone WILL fix it for the next video played.
What appears to be happening is that on the first play, observedBitrate in the event log is correct and the correct bit rate stream is played. The second playback shows observedBitrate starting out an order of magnitude less and no reasonable amount of time sees that rate change significantly.
If the connection is an order of magnitude better than necessary (evidently that is true for most of these users including myself pre-Network Link Conditioner testing), then everything appears to work normally and life is good. What is even stranger, is that on these higher quality connections I don't see the same observedBitrate drop. Also, it appears that video served up from a different ip (but not different domains from same ip) will work once and then fail the second time as if some kind of connection bit rate cache is being used? These last two observations have not been repeated enough to be cast in stone but have been observed more than once.
I've scoured the iOS 13 release notes in hopes that I'm missing some change or need for a new key but nothing strikes me as relevant.
Any ideas appreciated!!!
A very similar question was posted earlier this year Video playback issues only on iOS 13 with AVPlayerViewController and AVPlayer when using HLS video. The unaccepted answer in that question does not apply here (and may not apply there either for all we know). I do wait for StreamPlayerItemStatusObserverContext to change to AVPlayerStatusReadyToPlay.