iOS app with YouTube v3 API and youtube-ios-player-helper can't autoplay videos

Question

I am having a problem autoplaying videos with the youtube-ios-player-helper pod provided by Google/YouTube. Here is the relevant part of my app (iOS 10, Swift 3):

• a ChannelVideosViewController that displays video thumbnails as UIViews with an UITapGestureRecognizer that in turn segues to my PlayerViewController and passes the videoId from the API call

• a PlayerViewController as follows:

  var youtubePlayerView = YTPlayerView() // player for videos
  var youtubeVideoID = String() // videoId from API passed by ChannelVideosViewController
  
  override func viewDidLoad() {
  // ... skipping UI stuff
  
  view.addSubview(youtubePlayerView)
  youtubePlayerView.load(withVideoId: youtubeVideoID, playerVars: ["autoplay":1,"modestbranding":1,"showinfo":0,"rel":0])
  }
  

With the code above the helper library successfully loads the videos and plays them in fullscreen when I press the "big red button" but I want to autoplay the videos directly after I segue into the view. Is there a way to do this?

• "autoplay":1 from the YouTube docs doesn't seem to cut it for iOS.
• youtubePlayerView.playVideo() doesn't do anything

Mandalay

Hi! did the autoplay works with you? – Cluny

@Llg Hi! Sadly I have gotten a bit sidetracked lately due to other projects but to answer your question - not really; I am able to play videos etc. but autoplay still doesn't work. Do you have a solution for this? Or are you having the same problem as well? – Mandalay

@Sadly I have the same problem :( – Cluny

@Llg yeah.. maybe somebody can help at some point.. but better yet - I'll try to solve it myself :) I'll be coming back to this issue in the following weeks – Mandalay

can you please take a look on #40551414 and help me if you have an idea about it? – Cluny

Answer 1

Conform to YTPlayerViewDelegate protocol like this:

self.youtubePlayer.delegate = self

Now use this delegate method to play video automatically when player is ready:

extension ViewController: YTPlayerViewDelegate {
    func playerViewDidBecomeReady(_ playerView: YTPlayerView) {
        self.youtubePlayer.playVideo()
    }
}

It works perfectly in my case.

Lubet

sorry for the belated reply - I am currently not working on the app but this seems like a cool solution; marking as answered :) – Mandalay

No problem...thank you for accepting the answer, it will work for sure :) – Lubet

Answer 2

Based on this github the autopilot doesn't work with the iOS player, as a workaround try this one:

(void)playerViewDidBecomeReady:(YTPlayerView *)playerView{ [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:@"Playback started" object:self]; [self.playerView playVideo]; }

For more information, check these threads:

• AutoPlay Not working properly

• Using YTPlayerView to play embedded YouTube video in iOS

Halfblood

Ok I gave this a try and now that I think about it - I stumbled across this a few days ago. playerViewDidBecomeReady is supposed to be a delegate method of YTPlayerView but Xcode can't find it. Maybe they removed it? I also can't post a Notification with the new API without having an NSNotification.Name and "Playback started" is not available - probably due to the missing delegate method of YTPlayerView. – Mandalay

I'm not sure if they remove it or not. But, you can double check on that by searching it or find an issue about that. – Halfblood