Downloading starts immediately after CachingPlayerItem created

[hssrrw]

Hey. I'm pretty new to iOS development so I probably misunderstand something.

What I see is CachingPlayerItem starts downloading right after I create a new instance of it.
What I expect is that it starts downloading either after play() is called for AVPlayer or download() for CachingPlayerItem. In this case, it's not very clear what the purpose of download() is.

[neekeetab]

I can confirm the same behavior

[neekeetab]

I've taken a look at this issue again and figured out that it's instantiating AVPlayer with an item that triggers the download. This wasn't the case before, apparently Apple has changed the implementation slightly at some point.

[joeldrotleff]

I believe this is intentional behavior; it's useful so that you can "preload" a video by just instantiating an AVPlayer before you actually intend to start playing it