If AVPlayer.rate is set to e.g. 16, then one can see from server logs that i-frame playlists are requested. If during scrubbing player is paused and all the seeks are inaccurate (tolerance after and before is kCMTimePositiveInfinity), then i-frames do not seem to be utilized by AVPlayer. Would it somehow be possible to instruct AVPlayer to enter a state where it would only utilized i-frame playlists? Or is it as efficient to do inaccurate seeks with the actual playlists (because inaccurate seeks only target keyframes)?
On iOS 9.x I was able to utilize AVAssetImageGenerator, but that no longer seems to work on iOS 10.x (I haven't reported a bug yet).
