iOS YTPlayerView force video quality

Question

I am currently using iOS-youtube-player-helper library in our application. There is a view controller, with a YTPlayerView that has an aspect ratio of 16:9, which means it takes only a part of the screen. The video is loaded in medium and no matter how, I could not get it to play in 720P or 1080P. I am certain that these qualities are available, it's just the YTPlayerView forcing the quality based on the video player height. Because this is a library and not direct iframe embed, I cannot use "vq" parameter(specifying vq in playerVars does not seem to work), and setting the quality to be small then change it later does not work either(refer to this issue on GitHub)

Now, given the factor that I cannot make the YTPlayerView to fill up the whole screen, because of UI designing issues. So, is it possible to force the YTPlayerView to play in at least 720P? (Workarounds, changing the library code, ...)

Because this is an app that will be on App Store(and of course we don't want to have any legal disputes with google either), please don't suggest using libraries that are against the Youtube ToC such as XCDYouTubeKit

Many Thanks

Answer 1

I've found a workaround and this works well for me.

First of all, the problems depends by the webView size constructed inside the YTPlayerView. For example if you have a 320x200 playerView, try to forcing your video to 720hd don't work because the iFrame youtube player class re-switch to a better resolution according to your player size (in this case small quality because you have 320x200).

You can see this SO answer that explain this issue.

When you have imported the YTPlayerView class to your project you have two files: YTPlayerView.h and YTPlayerView.m

YTPlayerView.m (Update to work also on iPads)

---

I've change the function where the webview is initialized with a custom size (4k resolution) and to the last part I've added the possibility to scale the contents and restore the original frame, like this:

- (UIWebView *)createNewWebView {
    CGRect frame = CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 4096.0, 2160.0); //4k resolution
    UIWebView *webView = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:frame];
    //UIWebView *webView = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:self.bounds];

    webView.autoresizingMask = (UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleWidth | UIViewAutoresizingFlexibleHeight);
    webView.scrollView.scrollEnabled = NO;
    webView.scrollView.bounces = NO;

    if ([self.delegate respondsToSelector:@selector(playerViewPreferredWebViewBackgroundColor:)]) {
        webView.backgroundColor = [self.delegate playerViewPreferredWebViewBackgroundColor:self];
        if (webView.backgroundColor == [UIColor clearColor]) {
            webView.opaque = NO;
        }
    }

    webView.scalesPageToFit = YES;
    if ( UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad )
    {
        CGSize contentSize = webView.scrollView.contentSize;
        CGSize viewSize = self.bounds.size;
        float scale = viewSize.width / contentSize.width;
        webView.scrollView.minimumZoomScale = scale;
        webView.scrollView.maximumZoomScale = scale;
        webView.scrollView.zoomScale = scale;
        // center webView after scaling..
        [webView setFrame:CGRectMake(0.0, self.frame.origin.y/3, 4096.0, 2160.0)];
    } else {
        webView.frame = self.bounds;
    }
    [webView reload];
    return webView;
}

---

Hope this helps who try to use the Youtube original player in his project.

P.S.: All my tries were did with a swift project and the following vars:

var playerVars:Dictionary =
        ["playsinline":"1",
         "autoplay":"1",
         "modestbranding":"1",
         "rel":"0",
         "controls":"0",
         "fs":"0",
         "origin":"https://www.example.com",
         "enablejsapi":"1",
         "iv_load_policy":"3",
         "showinfo":"0"] 

Using the functions:

self.playerView.load(withVideoId: "Rk6_hdRtJOE", playerVars: self.playerVars)

and the follow method to force the resolution:

self.playerView.loadVideo(byId: "Rk6_hdRtJOE", startSeconds: 0.0, suggestedQuality: YTPlaybackQuality.HD720)

---

About iPads:

As reported by Edward in comments there was a little problem on iPads, that's because these devices seems don't apply scalesPageToFit. The goal is to check if the device is an iPad, then to scale (zooming out) the scrollView to host the little view bounds. I've tested on my iPad air and it works. Let me know.