BlogAfter almost a year, Apple finally fixed a fatal bug with tvOS 17 in September: while playing movies (via M3U8 playlist), the app sometimes crashed when the system function in AVFoundation tried to display the duration even though it was not there yet / was known.
Unfortunately, 2 new bugs have been added: firstly, when starting to play the movie, an incorrect playback position is sometimes displayed – e.g. 10 minutes instead of 2 minutes. As soon as the movie is completely segmented and the total duration of the movie is known, the display jumps back to the actual playback position.
On the other hand, the total duration sometimes changes during M3U8 playback: e.g. instead of the original 1:30 hours it changes to 0:45 hours. In this case, playback “hangs” at 0:45 hours.
We have also reported this bug to Apple, but have extended nessMediaCenter for Apple TV 1.4.3: the duration of the movie is “monitored” during playback – and if it suddenly changes to a shorter duration, the movie is started again and the last playback position is restored.
These 3 bugs suggest that Apple only knows 2 different M3U8 playlists: either live streams with infinite playback (EVENT) or movie playback (VOD, Video On Demand), in which the movie has already been completely segmented in advance.
However, nessViewer’s media server only segments movies once playback has started – storing all movies segmented on a hard disk would take up twice the hard disk space.
This essentially changes the M3U8 playlist type from EVENT to VOD once the movie segmentation is complete. So from unknown or infinite playback time to known or finite playback time.
According to the documentation of the “AVFoundation” system library, this is generally supported – but unfortunately not without bugs.
