Swift3: Displaying Video in Collection View - ios

Question

I'm relatively new to Swift.
I'm currently trying to grab videos stored in the photo library and display them in a collection view. After selecting a video in the collection view, I want to be able to play the video.
Right now I've written part of the function grabVideos and I have 2 questions:
How should I store these videos? Can they be stored as UIImages? A lot of the other sources I found grabbed videos from online sources and they just stored the video url
What should I do in the resultHandler? I would assume thats were I store my videos into a global array
Note: code below is in a function called getVideos()
let imgManager = PHImageManager.default()
let requestOption = PHVideoRequestOptions()
requestOption.isSynchronous = true
requestOption.deliveryMode = .highQualityFormat
let fetchOption = PHFetchOptions()
fetchOption.sortDescriptors = [NSSortDescriptor(key: "creationDate", ascending: false)]
if let fetchResult:PHFetchResult = PHAsset.fetchAssets(with: .video, options: fetchOption) {
if fetchResult.count > 0 {
for i in 0...fetchResult.count {
imgManager.requestAVAsset(forVideo: fetchResult.object(at: i) as! PHAsset, options: requestOption, resultHandler: {{ (<#AVAsset?#>, <#AVAudioMix?#>, <#[AnyHashable : Any]?#>) in
<#code#>
}})
}
} else {
print("Error: No Videos Found")
}
}

Answer 1

First you add a variable to your ViewController var fetchResults: PHFetchResult<PHAsset>?
Then you execute the fetch in viewDidLoad for instance
let fetchOption = PHFetchOptions()
fetchOption.sortDescriptors = [NSSortDescriptor(key: "creationDate", ascending: false)]
let fetchResults = PHAsset.fetchAssets(with: .video, options: fetchOption);
self.fetchResults = fetchResults
if fetchResults.count == 0 {
print("Error: No Videos Found")
return
}
In your collectionViewCell you have to add a UIImageView so that we can show thumbnail in each cell, then you just do the following in collection view data source methods
func collectionView(_ collectionView: UICollectionView, numberOfItemsInSection section: Int) -> Int {
return fetchResults?.count ?? 0
}
func collectionView(_ collectionView: UICollectionView, cellForItemAt indexPath: IndexPath) -> UICollectionViewCell {
let cell = collectionView.dequeueReusableCell(withReuseIdentifier: "reuse", for: indexPath) as! TestCollectionViewCell
let videoAsset = fetchResults!.object(at: indexPath.item)
PHImageManager.default().requestImage(for: videoAsset, targetSize: cell.bounds.size, contentMode: .aspectFill, options: nil) { (image: UIImage?, info: [AnyHashable : Any]?) in
cell.imageView.image = image
}
return cell
}
This can be approved upon, but will be OK for the first try, specifically look at using PHCachingImageManager instead of PHImageManager, more on this in the links below:
PHCachingImageManager
How to use PHCachingImageManager
How to play a video from PHAsset you can find answered:
Swift - Playing Videos from iOS PHAsset