YTPlayerView youtube-ios-player-helper pause not working

Question

I'm having trouble with the Youtube youtube-ios-player-helper library. I can load a video into the player and it plays but if I tap pause the video stops for a few seconds and then starts playing again.

The incredibly simple UIViewController code to start the video is:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [super viewDidLoad];
    self.player = [[YTPlayerView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(X, Y, WIDTH, HEIGHT)];

    self.player.delegate = self;
    [self.view addSubview:self.player];
    [self.player loadWithVideoId:@"bQCjOm4p5jM"];

}

I instrumented the didChangeToState delegate method with NSLog as follows:

- (void)playerView:(YTPlayerView *)playerView didChangeToState:(YTPlayerState)state {
    switch (state) {
        case kYTPlayerStatePlaying:
            NSLog(@"Started playback");
            break;
        case kYTPlayerStatePaused:
            NSLog(@"Paused playback");
            break;
        default:
            NSLog(@"didChangeToState %d", state);
            break;
    }
}

In the Xcode log, when I tap 'play' to start the video playing, I see:

didChangeToState 4

The value 4 does not appear to be defined in YTPlayerView.m. When the video actually starts playing I see the expected Started playback log message.

When I tap 'pause', I don't see anything in the log (no didChangeToState event triggered - the event I'd expect would be kYTPlayerStatePaused per the YTPlayerView docs). However a few seconds later, the video starts playing again, and then I see two consecutive Started playback log messages (kYTPlayerStatePlaying events). Every time I press 'pause' to try to pause the video, it pauses for a few seconds (with no kYTPlayerStatePaused event), but then it starts playing again and I see Started playback log messages.

Anyone else seeing this? Anyone know where to go from here? This is Xcode 6.2 and build target is iOS 8.0.

Answer 1

I found a solution here in the Github issue tracker for the code. Sorry, I guess I missed that in my earlier researching.

The fix described is here: https://github.com/youtube/youtube-ios-player-helper/issues/86

In YTPlayerView-iframe-player.html, remove or comment below code.

window.setInterval(forcePlay, 5000);

There's another suggested fix that completely replaces the YTPlayerView-iframe-player.html file but the above seems to have worked for me. It concerns me that Google's own code for this basic function is so fundamentally broken.