Objective C - Play Video From Application Temp Folder

Recently in one of my iOS project , there was requirement to play Video stored in temporary folder of Application data. After some hours of struggle I managed to get it working.

So the problem I was facing is I have absolute URL of the video that I was trying to play in MPMoviePlayerController but it was not working as the player was displayed for couple of seconds and it's dismissed automatically and there was a black screen.

So after sometime I found out that MPMoviePlayerController is deprecated, instead of it we shall use AVPlayer and that too was not working if I give absolute path to initialize a player. So first of all I just extracted file name fro the absolute path will following code.

NSRange range = [filePath rangeOfString:@"/" options:NSBackwardsSearch];
NSUInteger index = range.location;      
filename = [filePath substringFromIndex:index+1];

Now we will initialize player. Please note you have to import AVKIt first in your header file.

#import <AVKit/AVKit.h>

Now initialize player.

NSString *outputPath = [NSTemporaryDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent:filename];
AVAsset *asset = [AVAsset assetWithURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:outputPath]];
AVPlayer *_avPlayer = [[AVPlayer alloc]initWithPlayerItem:[[AVPlayerItem alloc]initWithAsset:asset]];

movieLayer = [AVPlayerLayer playerLayerWithPlayer:_avPlayer];
movieLayer.frame = self.view.bounds;
[self.view.layer addSublayer:movieLayer];

So player will be added as sublayer on the view so we have to dismiss it when video finished playing.

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
selector:@selector(videoDidFinish:)
name:AVPlayerItemDidPlayToEndTimeNotification
  object:[_avPlayer currentItem]];

And add callback function to remove player layer.

- (void)videoDidFinish:(id)notification
{
    NSLog(@"finsihed");
    [movieLayer removeFromSuperlayer];
    [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self];
}

That's it. Hope this will help you.