How to autoplay a YouTube video in a UIWebView
I have seen a lot of posts in here about this issue, but still couldn't find a perfect answer for this problem.
So I have a tableview, and each cell has a play button inside it. When the user tap the play button, I add a UIWebView to this cell, and play a YouTube video.
static NSString *youTubeVideoHTML = @"<html>\
<body style=\"margin:0;\">\
<iframe class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text/html\" width=\"%0.0f\" height=\"%0.0f\" src=\"http://www.youtube.com/embed/%@\" frameborder=\"0\">\
</iframe>\
</body>\
</html>";
- (void)playVideoWithId:(NSString *)videoId {
NSString *html = [NSString stringWithFormat:youTubeVideoHTML, self.frame.size.width, self.frame.size.height, videoId];
[self loadHTMLString:html baseURL:nil];
}
The problem:
This code doesn't actually play the video like I want, it just initiate the YouTube player and show it with the YouTube red play button. Only when user tap the red button, the video will start playing.
So user has to tap two buttons until the video starts - not the best user experience...
Like I said I saw many posts about this issue, some not work at all, and some works but with some issues that bugs me.
One of the working solutions I found was in this post by @ilias, he shows how to get this working with loading the HTML from a file (instead of a string like I do), problem with this approche is that for every video I play I need to:
load the htm file -> embed the video Id in it -> write the file to disc -> only now I can play the video.
Strange thing is that this solution only work when you load the web view request from a file, if I try to load the request from a string equal to the file content, that doesn't work.
Answer
Apparently the problem was with the nil base url, when I changed it to resourceURL the autoplay worked.
[self loadHTMLString:html baseURL:[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourceURL]];
The full code for autoplay youtube videos (again this code mostly based on this post I just changed it to load from a string instead of a file):
static NSString *youTubeVideoHTML = @"<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><style>body{margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;}</style></head> <body> <div id=\"player\"></div> <script> var tag = document.createElement('script'); tag.src = \"http://www.youtube.com/player_api\"; var firstScriptTag = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; firstScriptTag.parentNode.insertBefore(tag, firstScriptTag); var player; function onYouTubePlayerAPIReady() { player = new YT.Player('player', { width:'%0.0f', height:'%0.0f', videoId:'%@', events: { 'onReady': onPlayerReady, } }); } function onPlayerReady(event) { event.target.playVideo(); } </script> </body> </html>";
- (void)playVideoWithId:(NSString *)videoId {
NSString *html = [NSString stringWithFormat:youTubeVideoHTML, self.frame.size.width, self.frame.size.height, videoId];
[self loadHTMLString:html baseURL:[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourceURL]];
}