SwiftUI video player - how to get current time?

Question

I am having a nightmare with getting a video player to work in swiftUI where I can easily get video timestamp, hide video controls and play / pause the video easily.

Read if you want, but I have edited the post slightly more below: To tackle this I tried to implement my own video player in AVFoundation and then show that in a SwiftUI view, however, the code is a mess and I don't really understand it. It is hard to use and difficult to implement. To see my efforts I have linked a playground here: Playground Project Download Here for MacOS However, since this project has become such a mess, I was hoping that someone could explain / show how to:

1. Create a video player from a URL - local / external.
2. Play / Pause the video depending on the timestamp.
3. Hide control

Here is some other code that I wrote just for displaying the video:

import SwiftUI
import AVKit

struct VideoView: View {
   private let player = AVPlayer(url: URL(string: "https://bitdash-a.akamaihd.net/content/sintel/hls/playlist.m3u8")!)
   
   var body: some View {
     VideoPlayer(player: player)
            .onAppear() {
                // Start the player going, otherwise controls don't appear
                player.play()
            }
            .onDisappear() {
                // Stop the player when the view disappears
                player.pause()
            }
   }
}

struct ContentView_Previews: PreviewProvider {
    static var previews: some View {
        VideoView()
    }
}

To remove the controls I added the modifier .disabled(true) onto the VideoPlayer but it still shows for the first couple seconds, this isn't a nightmare but would be nice if it didn't show at all. But couldn't get the video to play / pause depending on the timestamp.

Ie. If video is at 1 minute then pause etc...

I found online that you can do something like this:

let currentPlayer = AVPlayer()
if let currentItem = currentPlayer.currentItem {
    let duration = currentItem.asset.duration
}
let currentTime = currentPlayer.currentTime()

But I'm not sure how to implement it into the code above. Its' from: here

EDIT: I've tried to implement it like this in a playground on MacOS:

import SwiftUI
import PlaygroundSupport
import AVKit

struct VideoView: View {
    private let player = AVPlayer(url: URL(string: "https://bitdash-a.akamaihd.net/content/sintel/hls/playlist.m3u8")!)
    
    
    
    var body: some View {
        VideoPlayer(player: player)
            .onAppear() {
                // Start the player going, otherwise controls don't appear
                player.play()
            }
            .onDisappear() {
                // Stop the player when the view disappears
                player.pause()
            }
            .onChange(of: player.currentTime(), perform: { value in
                if let currentItem = player.currentItem {
                    let duration = currentItem.asset.duration
                }
                let currentTime = player.currentTime()
                print (cmTimeToSeconds(currentTime))
            })
        //.disabled(true)
        
        
    }
}

func cmTimeToSeconds(_ time: CMTime) -> TimeInterval? {
    let seconds = CMTimeGetSeconds(time)
    if seconds.isNaN {
        return nil
    }
    return TimeInterval(seconds)
}


PlaygroundPage.current.setLiveView(VideoView())

But onChange still isn't printing out the current time? Why is this?