Reuse same AVPlayer instance

[johanneslumpe]

We are currently throwing away and re-creating the AVPlayer. It would be nicer if we just reused the same instance and exchanged the item if the source changes.

[brentvatne]

@johanneslumpe - are there any tradeoffs here? what is the cost of throwing away & creating a new one?

[eduedix]

@brentvatne: I am going back and forth in the Navigator in my small app, which has a page that loads Video.
Everytime i go to the page with Video, memory usage jumps by around 70MB. I think thats cos new instance is alloc'ed each time.

[brentvatne]

@eduedix - that sounds like a good enough reason right there! thanks

[eduedix]

It would be indeed useful to have an API, which could let me kill the instance. It seems having only 1 instance is still not the optimum solution.
I might be wrong about this.

[brentvatne]

@eduedix - ideally how would you like to manage this?

[johanneslumpe]

@eduedix it's one instance per element, not sure why you need multiple players per element?

[johanneslumpe]

@brentvatne at the very least we'd save the cost of allocating a new instance. It might not be a huge optimization, but less allocation is always better ;)

[eduedix]

@brentvatne @johanneslumpe I am still in for only one instance. But it seems instance stays on in the background forever.

[johanneslumpe]

@brentvatne @eduedix I just pushed a small fix branch for this.
https://github.com/brentvatne/react-native-video/tree/feature/fix-unremoved-playerlayer

After that gets merged, you should see a significant memory drop, when removing the view with the video.