A Simple SwiftUI Video Player
My goal is to complete a simple video player app to learn the basics of SwiftUI, the Swift languages, and engaging with AVPlayer
I've done a lot of video work, but very little iOS app development. And I've never use Swift.
It turns out, that its simple to shove a Video Player into a SwiftUI App and play back a video via URL. There are many 50 line projects online that show it.
So let's go a little deeper during the exercise:
- Create multiple views, so I understand how to create independent Views that build into an app
- Cleanly separate Model and View code using proper techniques, listening for Model changes
- Observe AVPlayer state changes and report this dynamically on the app
- Discover how to detect (and report) errors
The final App will be a skeleton for creating a more full featured Video Player. It will consist of:
- A config view that configures what is to be played
- A Play button to load the player and play what is configured
- A video player that will play the video
- A status view that shows Player status as it changes, including error state
So to do this I would first need some background concepts. For example: what is the SwiftUI model? How does thee Swift language work? How do I create an iniytiate a player in AVFoundation?
These were very helpful to understand the concepts:
I got stuck trying to listen to AVPlayer status changes in a class and ensuring the changes gets broadcast back to my Status View. This article explains ObservableObject and State and helped me stop conflating the concepts
AvPlayer error observing was also a bit confusing. One useful Apple resource helped me understand I had to listen to both AVPlayer and AVPlayerItem state