Is it possible to dismiss Picture in Picture from an AVPlayerViewController

Question

I'm using AVPlayerViewController and have set canStartPictureInPictureAutomaticallyFromInline = true which works as expected.

What i'd like to achieve, is if the app is opened whilst a video is in PiP mode, I want to automatically dismiss the PiP to put the video back into the AVPlayerViewController, as currently the video stays in PiP and the in-app video player shows the PiP placeholder.

I can listen to the delegate callbacks in AVPlayerViewControllerDelegate to know when PiP is active, but I can't figure out how to dismiss it.

AVPictureInPictureController has a stopPictureInPicture() function, but I don't know how to add an AVPictureInPictureController to my player.

I use an AVPlayer instance passed into the AVPlayerViewController but from what i'm seeing, I need an AVPlayerLayer to pass into AVPictureInPictureController.

Answer 1

No, AVPlayerViewController cannot fulfill your requirement because it does not expose its internally managed pictureInPictureController(AVPictureInPictureController) to developers.

To achieve your goal, you would need to implement a custom solution by creating your own CustomPlayerViewController and manually managing the pictureInPictureController(AVPictureInPictureController) instance.