Possible Thread issues when looping MPMoviePlayerController video - iphone

Question

I am trying to play a short 6 second video in my view using MPMoviePlayerController and would like it to loop indefinitely. I used the following code to achieve this:
NSString *filepath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"MyVideo" ofType:#"m4v"];
NSURL *fileURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:filepath];
moviePlayerController = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:fileURL];
moviePlayerController.view.frame = CGRectMake(10, 240, 300, 163);
moviePlayerController.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleNone;
moviePlayerController.repeatMode = MPMovieRepeatModeOne;
[self.view addSubview:moviePlayerController.view];
[moviePlayerController play];
The problem is that the video starts playing in a loop as desired, but then eventually stops after a random number of iterations. Note that the file size of the video is very small (less than 500 KB).
After some thought, I speculated that the behavior may be attributed to the fact that I am running the above code inside the main thread. In an effort to run the above code in its own thread, I tried the following:
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
[super viewDidLoad];
[NSThread detachNewThreadSelector:#selector(playVideo) toTarget:self withObject:nil];
}
-(void) playVideo
{
NSString *filepath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"MyVideo" ofType:#"m4v"];
NSURL *fileURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:filepath];
moviePlayerController = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:fileURL];
moviePlayerController.view.frame = CGRectMake(10, 240, 300, 163);
moviePlayerController.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleNone;
moviePlayerController.repeatMode = MPMovieRepeatModeOne;
[self.view addSubview:moviePlayerController.view];
[moviePlayerController play];
}
Now, the problem is that the MPMoviePlayerController's view's frame just appears as a black rectangle where the video should be but no video plays.
I would really appreciate any help into how to get this to work as desired (I don't care if its with or without additional threads). All I need is to have a video play and loop continuously.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I have the same issue. But using the separate thread for this is not a good solution.
1. Working with UIKit (addSubview method) in not main thread could give you unexpected behavior.
2. It looks like that MPMoviePlayerController has its own background thread. So all this stuff working in other thread already.
Probable solution could be in using MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishNotification and MPMoviePlayerPlaybackStateDidChangeNotification notifications and manual restoring playback.