Framework to Play a Video in the Background of any UIView

SwiftVideoBackground

SwiftVideoBackground is an easy to use Swift framework that provides the ability to play a video on any UIView. This provides a beautiful UI for login screens, or splash pages, as implemented by Spotify and many others.

Features

  • [x] Play a video with one line of code
  • [x] Supports local videos && videos from a web URL
  • [x] Automatically adjusts when device orientation changes
  • [x] Automatically resumes video when app re-enters foreground
  • [x] Pause, resume, restart, and other controls
  • [x] Loop videos (optional)
  • [x] Mute sound (optional)
  • [x] Darken videos so overlying UI stands out more (optional)
  • [x] Documentation

Integration

CocoaPods

You can use CocoaPods to install SwiftVideoBackground by adding it to your Podfile:

For Swift 5:

pod 'SwiftVideoBackground'

For Swift 4:

pod 'SwiftVideoBackground', '~> 3.0'

For Swift 3:

pod 'SwiftVideoBackground', '0.06'

Carthage

You can use Carthage to install SwiftVideoBackground by adding it to your Cartfile:

github "dingwilson/SwiftVideoBackground"

Manually

To use this library in your project manually you may:

  1. for Projects, just drag VideoBackground.swift to the project tree
  2. for Workspaces, include the whole SwiftVideoBackground.xcodeproj

Migration Guide

Version 3.0.0

Version 2.0.0

See the quick migration guide.

Usage

Example

import UIKit
import SwiftVideoBackground

class MyViewController: UIViewController {
  override func viewDidLoad() {
    super.viewDidLoad()

    try? VideoBackground.shared.play(view: view, videoName: "myVideo", videoType: "mp4")

    /* or from URL */

    let url = URL(string: "https://coolVids.com/coolVid.mp4")!
    VideoBackground.shared.play(view: view, url: url)
  }
}

Documentation for Version 0.06 (Swift 3) can be found here.

Customization

play() has four additional optional parameters for customization:

  • darkness: CGFloat - Value between 0 and 1. The higher the value, the darker the video. Defaults to 0.
  • isMuted: Bool - Indicates whether video is muted. Defaults to true.
  • willLoopVideo: Bool - Indicates whether video should restart when finished. Defaults to true.
  • setAudioSessionAmbient: Bool - Indicates whether to set the shared AVAudioSession to ambient. If this is not done, audio played from your app will pause other audio playing on the device. Defaults to true.

So for example:

VideoBackground.shared.play(
    view: view,
    videoName: "myVideo",
    videoType: "mp4",
    darkness: 0.25,
    isMuted: false,
    willLoopVideo: true,
    setAudioSessionAmbient: true
)

-> will play the video with the sound on, slightly darkened, continuously looping, and without affecting other sources of audio on the device.

Any combination of the parameters can be included or left out.

setAudioSessionAmbient only has an effect in iOS 10.0+. For more information, see the docs.

Controls

  • pause() - Pauses the video.
  • resume() - Resumes the video.
  • restart() - Restarts the video.
  • getThumbnailImage(from: URL, at: CMTime) - Generate an image from the video to show as thumbnail.
  • darkness - Change this CGFloat to adjust the darkness of the video. Value 0 to 1. Higher numbers are darker. Setting to an invalid value does nothing.
  • isMuted - Change this Bool to mute/unmute the video.
  • willLoopVideo - Change this Bool to set whether the video restarts when it ends.
  • videoGravity - Default is .resizeAspectFill. Change to .resizeAspect (doesn't fill view) or .resize (doesn't conserve aspect ratio).
  • playerLayer - The AVPlayerLayer that can be accessed for advanced control and customization of the video.

Singleton

SwiftVideoBackground includes a singleton instance that can be conveniently accessed with VideoBackground.shared. An instance of VideoBackground can only play one video on one UIView at a time. So if you need to play on multiple UIViews, you need to retain an instance of VideoBackground for each UIView:

let videoBackground1 = VideoBackground()

Adding Videos To Your Project

In order to play local videos, you must add them to your project:

  1. Open project navigator
  2. Select your target
  3. Select Build Phases
  4. Select Copy Bundle Resources
  5. Click + to add a video

GitHub