Getting started with iOS SDK

This section gives an introduction to the core features of the Flowplayer iOS SDK and lists all the requirements for adding the SDK in an iOS Project. This guide assumes that you have basic understanding of iOS development and that you are familiar with Xcode and Swift.

Introduction

The Flowplayer iOS SDK is a native media player, written entirely in Swift and provides an easy-to-use API which enables developers to create beautiful iOS applications that play audio and video both locally and over the Internet. The Flowplayer iOS SDK uses AVPlayer in its core and therefore takes advantage of all its powerful features. The SDK supports adaptive streaming technologies such as HLS, as well as the most popular single container formats, such as MP4, MP3, AVI, and several more.

Our demo application is available open source on Github and it will help you to better understand how to include the Flowplayer iOS SDK in your project.

Supported features

Some of the most important features of the Flowplayer iOS SDK include but are not limited to:

HLS, MP4, MP3, AVI formats.
Fullscreen playback and configurable device orientation management.
Callbacks for monitoring a wide range of player events.
Interactive Media Ads (IMA).
VAST and VMAP advertisement.
Customizable user interface.

Prerequisites

In order to be able to compile and run your application using the Flowplayer iOS SDK, the following few requirements need to be met.

Minimum iOS version

The Flowplayer iOS SDK is available to devices running iOS version 10.0+.

Dependencies

The Flowplayer iOS SDK depends on the following two frameworks:

Add the SDK to your project

Once you have met all the prerequisites, you are ready to add the Flowplayer iOS SDK to your project and start developing.

Download the SDK

You can download the SDK in one of the following 2 ways.

CocoaPods

Add FlowplayerCore together with its dependencies in your Podfile:

pod 'FlowplayerCore', '~> 1.3.1'
pod 'Rollbar', '~> 1.8.1'
pod 'GoogleAds-IMA-iOS-SDK', '~> 3.9'

Execute pod install and you're ready to go.

Manually

Dowload the binary framework of Flowplayer iOS SDK from here. As mentioned earlier, the Flowplayer iOS SDK depends on Rollbar and Google IMA which you need to download as well. Next you need to link and embed these 3 frameworks (Flowplayer, Rollbar, and Google IMA) to your target. Your target's Build Phases should look similar to this:

Manual installation

Update Info.plist

In your target's Info.plist file add a new string with the key FlowplayerAccessToken and set the value to your Flowplayer access token, in order to enable the player to play content.

Flowplayer tokens can be created and revoked from the Flowplayer Dashboard

Obtain token