How to play videos using AVPlayerViewController

Swift version: 5.0

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    May 28th 2019

AVPlayerViewController is designed to make it easy to play media just like Apple’s own apps. You can play movies and audio, local and remote, and you benefit from the same user interface layout used elsewhere in the system.

Using the class only takes a few steps, starting with importing the AVKit framework and creating a URL that points to the movie you want to play. Once that’s done, you create an AVPlayer instance pointing at your URL, send that in to an AVPlayerViewController, then call play() on it when you’re ready.

Here’s some example code to get you started:

let player = AVPlayer(url: videoURL)
let vc = AVPlayerViewController()
vc.player = player

present(vc, animated: true) {
    vc.player?.play()
}

Available from iOS 8.0

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