Is it possible to cache HLS segments with AVPlayer?

Root Problem​

Our video buffers a lot when seeking in iOS. It buffers quite a bit more than our web player which saves copies of the already watched segments in temp storage.

​Desired Solution​

Caching the video segments locally on the device's disk. We're fine with caching a single quality and always replaying it.

​Blocker​

We can't find a way to perform caching within AVFoundation/AVPlayer.

What We've Tried

2 ways to intercept networking requests with AVPlayer.

1. Conforming to ​AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate ​and handling the loading of the media manually

Doesn't work with HLS. You can load the m3u8 files by implementing AVAssetResourceLoaderDelegate​, which allows you to pass authentication or to decrypt the response, however the .ts files can't be loaded. Here's the code we tried: https://gist.github.com/nathanhillyer/84e46152d7c4c88183b6

2. Implementing a NSURLProtocol ​to capture requests for .ts files.

AVURLAsset actually avoids being intercepted. Somehow the network requests just don't get captured. (No clue why)