How to show paused video instead of black screen when starting AVPlayer

Question

I am able to successfully create a player but was annoyed with the initial black screen. I decided to overlay a UIImageView and hide it once the player started. This worked, but I didn't want the hassle of creating and maintaining images for all my videos.

I was able to achieve the exact results I wanted by playing and immediately pausing the player after instantiating it. The only issue was that sometimes the state of the player was getting recorded incorrectly, so when I went to start the player again, the status was listed as already "playing" even though the player was paused.

I starting looking into using AVPlayerItem seekToTime but haven't found any feasible solutions. Is there a "non hacky" way of achieving this?

Answer 1

If you're using an AVPlayerViewController, this is a perfect use of the player controller's contentOverlayView property. This is a UIView between the player layer and the controls exposed exactly for this purpose:

First, create the screenshot:

let asset = AVAsset(URL: URL(string: "")!) // link to some video
let imageGenerator = AVAssetImageGenerator(asset: asset)
let screenshotTime = CMTime(seconds: 1, preferredTimescale: 1)
if let imageRef = try? imageGenerator.copyCGImageAtTime(screenshotTime, actualTime: nil) {

    let image = UIImage(CGImage: imageRef)

    // see part 2 below
}

Now, add the image as a subview of the contentOverlayView in the player controller:

// in the same try block

let imageView = UIImageView(image: image)
let playerVC = AVPlayerViewController()
let playerItem = AVPlayerItem(asset: asset)
playerVC.player = AVPlayer(playerItem: playerItem)

self.presentViewController(playerVC, animated: true) { 
    playerVC.contentOverlayView?.addSubview(imageView)
    // adjust the frame of your imageView to fit on the player controller's contentOverlayView
}

Then, remove the imageView subview when the player starts playing the asset, or when buffering completes.