Using the player

This section gives a brief introduction to the player API in order to help you get quickly started.

Add a player to a UIView

The core of the Flowplayer iOS SDK is the FPFlowplayerViewController which inherits from UIViewController and can therefore be added to a UIView or to a UIViewController in an ordinary fashion like so:

import UIKit
import FlowplayerCore

class PlayerViewController: UIViewController {
    @IBOutlet var containerView: UIView!

    private let flowplayerViewController = FPFlowplayerViewController()

    override func viewDidAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
        // Add the FPFlowplayerViewController's view either to a container view or directly to your UIViewController's view.
        containerView.addSubview(flowplayerViewController.view)
    }
}

You can also add FPFlowplayerViewController to your Storyboard similar to any other UIViewController.

Prepare player

FPFlowplayerViewController can play media either by fetching a so-called Flowplayer config or directly from a media URL that you specify.

In the first scenario, the player needs to be prepared with a Flowplayer mediaId and a playerId. This is achieved by preparing the player with a FPFlowplayerMedia instance, similar to the example below. The player will then fetch the Flowplayer config which contains the media URL, the ad schedule (if any), and branding-related information.

let flowplayerMedia = FPFlowplayerMedia(mediaId: "some-media-id", playerId: "some-player-id")
flowplayerViewController.prepare(flowplayerMedia: flowplayerMedia, autoStart: true)

In a similar way, the player can be prepared with a local or remote media URL. This is possible by preparing the player with an ExternalVideo instance as shown below. An FPExternalMedia may optionally contain an FPAdSchedule, as well. For more information about ads, see section Advertisement.

let externalMedia = FPExternalMedia(mediaUrl: URL(string: "https://link.to.a.media.file")!)
flowplayerViewController.prepare(externalMedia: externalMedia, autoStart: true)

Limiting video bitrate

When playing HLS media you can configure the preferred maximum peak bitrate.

You can achieve this by defining the preferred peak bitrate as a double when constructing the media:

// Flowplayer media
let flowplayerMedia = FPFlowplayerMedia(mediaId: "some-media-id", playerId: "some-player-id", preferredPeakBitRate: 500000)

// ExternalMedia
let externalMedia = FPExternalMedia(mediaUrl: URL(string: "https://link.to.a.media.file.hls")!, preferredPeakBitRate: 500000)

This is offloaded to AVPlayer - see their documentation for gotchas and pitfalls here.