How to play movies with VideoPlayer

Paul Hudson @twostraws July 1st 2021

Updated for Xcode 13.0

New in iOS 14

SwiftUI’s VideoPlayer view lets us playback movies from any URL, local or remote. It comes from the AVKit framework, so you should make sure and add import AVKit before trying it out.

As an example, if you had video.mp4 in your app bundle and wanted to play it back, you’d use this:

VideoPlayer(player: AVPlayer(url:  Bundle.main.url(forResource: "video", withExtension: "mp4")!))
    .frame(height: 400)

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A video showing Niagara Falls, playing inside an iPhone.

Reminder: You need to add import AVKit to your Swift file to use this.

And if you want to play a remote video, use its remote URL instead:

VideoPlayer(player: AVPlayer(url:  URL(string: "https://bit.ly/swswift")!))
    .frame(height: 400)

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A video with a play button overlaid, inside an iPhone.

If you want, you can provide a second parameter to the VideoPlayer initializer that adds content to be drawn over the video. This will be drawn below the system video controls, but can respond to any events that aren’t caught by those controls.

For example, this places the text “Watermark” at the very top of the video area:

VideoPlayer(player: AVPlayer(url:  URL(string: "https://bit.ly/swswift")!)) {
    VStack {
        Text("Watermark")
            .foregroundColor(.black)
            .background(Color.white.opacity(0.7))
        Spacer()
    }
    .frame(width: 400, height: 300)
}

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A video with a play button overlaid, along with the word Watermark place at the top.