iOS HLS Media Playlist Interceptor

THEOplayer iOS SDK makes a number of network requests and receives responses while playing video. These requests and responses can be intercepted to make a new or modified request, or respond with a new response to the HLS playlist requests.

This guide explains how you set up THEOplayer iOS SDK to add and remove request/response interceptors.

We will use a simple UIKit UIViewController for this guide.

Set up THEOplayer

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    private var player: THEOplayer?

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        let player = THEOplayer()
        self.player = player
        player.frame = view.bounds
        player.addAsSubview(of: self.view)
        player.network.addMediaPlaylistInterceptor(self)
    }
}

Intercepting the requests and/or responses

Use the type parameter on each method below to filter for HLS playlist types ie. master, video, subtitles, etc... The rest of the usage is explained in comments in the code snippet below.

extension ViewController: MediaPlaylistInterceptor {
    // For modifications that you would make to the request, ie. add custom headers, query parameters, etc...
    func shouldInterceptPlaylistRequest(type: THEOplayerSDK.HlsPlaylistType) -> Bool { true }

    // For modifications that you would make to the response, ie. edit the m3u8 file content, vtt file content etc...
    func shouldInterceptPlaylistResponse(type: THEOplayerSDK.HlsPlaylistType) -> Bool { true }

    // Will be called if shouldInterceptPlaylistRequest returns true
    func didInterceptPlaylistRequest(type: THEOplayerSDK.HlsPlaylistType, request: URLRequest) async throws -> URLRequest {
        var modifiedRequest = request
        // modify
        // ...
        //...
        return modifiedRequest
    }

    // Will be called if shouldInterceptPlaylistResponse returns true
    func didInterceptPlaylistResponse(type: THEOplayerSDK.HlsPlaylistType, url: URL, response: URLResponse, data: Data) async throws -> Data {
        var modifiedResponseData = ""
        // customize the data string that you would like to return, should be a valid HLS playlist file
        // ...
        // ...
        let customDataResponse = modifiedResponseData.data(using: .utf8)
        return customDataResponse ?? data // `customDataResponse` is empty so playback will fail in this demo; return `data` to play
    }

    // Handle failure.
    func failedToPerformURLRequest(request: URLRequest, response: URLResponse) {}
}

DRM request interception

The MediaPlaylistInterceptor API does not intercept DRM requests. To interecept fairplay DRM requests, take a look at the following solution: https://github.com/THEOplayer/samples-drm-integration/blob/master/ios/README.md