Hide controls in AVPlayerViewController — only at start

Question

If you set AVPlayerViewController.showsPlaybackControls to false, the controls will not show at all. Even if you tap the screen.

I want the controls to start out hid

Answer 1

A simple way to do it in Swift 3 is to set myController.showsPlaybackControls = false, and to overlay the whole player view with a button or gesture recognizer. I embed it into another view in another controller on a storyboard to make this simple and to not override the player controller. The trick then is to hide the button after being clicked once, because the player controller will thereafter track taps to show/hide the controls.

@IBAction func enableControls(button:UIButton)
{
    controller?.showsPlaybackControls = true
    button.isHidden = true //The button is only needed once, then the player takes over.
}