Instant-on preloads parts of the media on one or more channels. After a user selects or switches channels, the content starts sooner because some of the buffering has already completed.
When your player is in the PTMediaPlayerStatusReady
status, call prepareToPlay
to preload and process some of the content for later playback.
If you do not call prepareToPlay
, calling play
automatically calls prepareToPlay
first. The preloading and processing is completed at this time.
TVSDK completes some or all of the following tasks for prepareToPlay
:
kSyncCookiesWithAVAsset
is set, TVSDK makes one request to the original M3U8 file to synchronize cookies.The PTMediaPlayer
and PTMediaPlayerItem
prepareToPlay
methods are equal. To avoid creating a separate PTMediaPlayer
instance for each asset, use the PTMediaPlayerItem
method.
Instant-on helps you launch multiple media player instances, or media-player item loader instances, simultaneously in the background and buffer video streams in all of these instances. When a user changes the channel, and the stream has buffered properly, calling play
on the new channel starts the playback sooner.