AVFoundation and video - ios

Question

I am trying to use AVFoundation, AVPlayer and AVPlayerViewController to show a video. Does anyone know of any good tutorials out there that does NOT use MPMoviePlayer?
Please let m eknow!
thank you!

Answer 1

AVPlayerViewController
AVPlayerViewController is the AVKit ViewController that hides away most of the complexity involved with dealing directly with AVFoundation. Its very simple and intuitive, if you check the AVPlayerViewController Class Reference you will notice that it does not hold that many properties, if you want to initialise one and attribute a video to it, you have three options ( that I can recall ).
Initialise it in code and set the frame of it;
Subclass it and call it when you wanna use it;
Use Storyboards / nibs to allocate a AVKit Player View Controller.
Either way its up to you and this is a common pattern among iOS developers, so it shouldn't strike as a surprise to you unless you are a complete beginner. Please note that for any of these ways of creating an AVPlayerViewController, you have to initialise the AVPlayer object with an AVPlayerItem or an URL carrying the video you want to display.
Subclassing AVPlayerViewController-Swift
Obs. This is the swift example, but the Objective-C one follows the same pattern, the only change is the syntax of each language.
class AVKitPlayerViewController: AVPlayerViewController {
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
// get the video URL
let videoURL = NSBundle.mainBundle().URLForResource("Test", withExtension: ".mov")
// Initialise with URL
player = AVPlayer(URL: videoURL!)
// Initialise with AVPlayerItem
let playerItem = AVPlayerItem(URL: videoURL!)
player = AVPlayer(playerItem: playerItem)
// If you want custom controls showsPlaybackControls should be false
// Then you must create your own buttons
//showsPlaybackControls = false
}
}
AVFoundation
AVFoundation is a very large and interesting framework, you can do a lot of advanced and interesting stuff with it. I would encourage you to go read the docs and checkout these WWDC-2015 sample code:
AVFoundationPiPPlayer: Picture-in-Picture Playback with AVKit
AVFoundationQueuePlayer-iOS: Using a Mixture of Local File Based Assets and HTTP Live Streaming Assets with AVFoundation
AVFoundationSimplePlayer-iOS: Using AVFoundation to Play Media
AVFoundation Programming Guide
AVFoundation Programming Guide
I hope this helps you. Happy Coding. :smile: