I have been trying to use a custom AVPlayerItem that lets me copy the currently playing media to file after it has been downloaded while it is streaming into the AVPlayer, essentially letting me cache the displayed video while showing the video as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, my application sometimes needs to download mp4 files from a server (that I don't control) that is giving the mime type as image/gif although the downloaded file IS an mp4 file. Because of this, my AVPlayer is not "streaming" in the video as it's downloaded, and only shows it once the file is completely downloaded and it realizes the file really is an MP4.
My thought is now to just download the file directly to a local file with a .mp4 extension that a standard AVPlayerItem can stream in, and write to this file while reading from it with the AVPlayerItem. Is this possible? Will the AVPlayerItem pause when it is still downloading/buffering the incomplete data or will it just produce an error without displaying anything? Is there a better way I can be doing this?