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

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.