As of September 2015, Apple announced their new operating system tvOS for the new Apple TV platform. This is a great news for the developers as they can submit their new tvOS apps for Apple TV on App Store. tvOS is mostly built on top of iOS platform, that means iOS developers won’t have much difficulties in getting used to writing apps on tvOS. There are some differences between iOS and tvOS because of the nature of two platforms. For instance you use a remote controller for Apple TV and a touch screen for iOS devices. Because of that some UIKit components from iOS are removed (such as UISlider and UISwitch) and some new concepts are introduced (such as UIFocusGuide) in tvOS.
You already know or using the iOS version of VideoKit, which is a great custom video player that plays divx,mkv, flv,xvid, ogg, vorbis and more; and that supports popular streaming protocols such as MMS, RTSP, RTMP, which are not supported by Apple native APIs. Also, it has many cool features like recording, having easy to use UIControls, playback in embedded view, full screen view and multiple players on same view, successful audio and video synching and so on.
Now get ready, it’s time for the great news!
We have added tvOS support to VideoKit, applying new concepts for tvOS such as Focus Management and controlling all features from the remote controller such as :
- play/pause video,
- fast forwarding or rewinding,
- start/stop recording,
- zomm in/out,
- mute/unmute,
- show/hide information view
- enter/exit fullcreen mode in embedded view.
VideoKit for tvOS is a complete video playing/streaming solution for tvOS platform, developed on top of self proven VideoKit for iOS stability and robustness.
Like the iOS version tvOS version of VideoKit comes with a sample application that contains a Full Screen sample, Embedded sample and Multi player sample. From tab bar controller you can switch between these three samples :
For the full screen view controller, we have made a very simple yet useful design considering what needs to exist in a video player view very similar to tvOS native video player.
In full screen mode you can :
- See file/stream name on top panel while playing, or connection information while loading and buffering
- Play/pause video with your Apple TV remote’s play/pause button
- Tap your remote’s touchpad to hide/unhide the onscreen panels.
- Fast forward or rewind video, panning back or forth your remote’s touchpad
When you hit menu button on your remote in full screen mode, you can select actions :
- Close Video
- Mute/unmute
- Zoom in/out
- Start/Stop Recording
- Show/Hide Info View
Embedded player gives you a great opportunity to be able to play video while navigating another content such as a list of available videos from a table view. tvOS version of VideoKit also supports embedded playback of videos like the iOS version. The embedded view is focusable that means when you bring focus to view you have full control over the view such as :
- Play/pause video with your Apple TV remote’s play/pause button
- Tap your remote’s touchpad to hide/unhide the onscreen panels.
- Fast forward or rewind video, panning back or forth your remote’s touchpad
- Enter/Exit full screen mode by double tapping your remote’s touchpad
- Get further control options when hitting the menu button, same as the full screen mode
Multiple players was one of the coolest feature of the iOS VideoKit which also exists in tvOS version.
In a TV platform this feature will be even more useful because playing/streaming multiple video files can be a more common use case in a tv application.
Videokit uses ffmpeg framework and ffmpeg 2.8 is recompiled for the VideoKit tvOS version.
The demo version can be downloaded from : here
Hope you enjoy VideoKit for tvOS…