mp4 video on iOS app using Swift - ios

Question

I've been looking at other posted questions regarding playing videos from websites and none of the solutions have worked for me. I get a black screen when I test my app, and the video doesn't seem to ever load.
Globally, I have declared:
var moviePlayer:MPMoviePlayerController!
And within my ViewDidLoad() function, I have:
let url:NSURL = NSURL(string:"http://uapi-f1.picovico.com/v2.1/v/nMirP/ArwenUndomiel.mp4")!
self.moviePlayer = MPMoviePlayerController(contentURL: url)
if let player = self.moviePlayer {
player.view.frame = CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: self.view.frame.size.width, height: self.view.frame.size.height)
player.view.sizeToFit()
player.scalingMode = MPMovieScalingMode.None
player.movieSourceType = MPMovieSourceType.Streaming
self.view.addSubview(player.view)
player.play()
}
Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

The URL that Picovico have given you actually responds with a message telling the requester that the content is not at this location but that they should try a different location - this is a common technique for URL redirecting.
You can see this if you try the link in a browser and capture the network request and responses. For example using the link you include above in Chrome gives this response:
You can see that the server is telling the client (browser in this case) to redirect (i.e. send a new request) to an S3 amazon URL which is where your video actually has been stored by Picovico.
When the browser then sends it's request to that location it finds the video successfully:
Looking at your video using ffprobe the format seems fine so it seems likely that the iOS client is having a hard time handling the redirect, or else that there was an issues with the URL redirection temporarily on Picovico's servers. If you still have the problem now then the former is most likely the problem.
If you take a look here you can see how someone has solved the problem of iOS media player handling redirects:
iOS Mediaplayer and URL redirection