I'm working with the MPMoviePlayerController for the iOS platform and am not sure why the "Done" and "Loading Movie..." controls are not displaying automatically when loading a new video.
My original implementation of this was to use the UIWebView control to stream the videos, and when the videos are accessed, the "Done" and "Loading Movie..." controls are displayed until the video is loaded and ready to play. I would like to reproduce the same user experience with the MPMoviePlayerController.
Should I get the "Done" and "Loading Movie..." control overlays for free? If not, what do I have to set to get them to show up while the video is loading?
NSURL *videoUrl = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString];
self.moviePlayer = [[[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] init] autorelease];
self.moviePlayer.movieControlMode = MPMovieControlModeDefault;
[self.moviePlayer setContentURL:videoUrl];
[self.moviePlayer prepareToPlay];
[self.view addSubview:self.moviePlayer.view];
[[self.moviePlayer view] setFrame: [self.view bounds]];
[self.moviePlayer setFullscreen:YES animated:YES];
This is answer to your follow-up question, but anyways... You can speed-up things a little bit with this:
prepareToPlay
Prepares the current item for playback. (required)
- (void)prepareToPlay
This method is called automatically when you call the play method. Calling it before you call play gives the receiver a chance to prepare items sooner and may result in decreased latency when starting playback. However, calling this method may also interrupt any active audio sessions.
Available in iOS 3.2 and later.
Declared In MPMediaPlayback.h
Related
I'm having trouble understanding this class and getting it to work properly, here is the piece of code where I use it:
MPMoviePlayerController *moviePlayer = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:_videoURL];
UIImage *videoThumbnail = [moviePlayer thumbnailImageAtTime:0 timeOption:MPMovieTimeOptionNearestKeyFrame];
[lastImageView setImage:videoThumbnail];
[moviePlayer setControlStyle:MPMovieControlStyleNone];
[moviePlayer setShouldAutoplay:YES];
[moviePlayer prepareToPlay];
[moviePlayer.view setFrame:lastImageView.frame];
moviePlayer.view.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation((90*M_PI)/180);
[self.view addSubview:moviePlayer.view];
[moviePlayer play];
The only reason why the videoThumbnail line is still there is because i didn't get the video to play until I was just trying it out to see if it would get the image from there and then it suddenly began to work... sort of.
Now it plays for 2-3 secs and then terminates without sending MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishNotification or MPMoviePlayerPlaybackStateDidChangeNotification
I googled around a bit and couldn't find any useful tips, could someone tell me what's wrong or what i am forgetting
If you're not assigning the newly created MPMoviePlayerController instance to anything other than a variable with local scope (moviePlayer), then the movie player will be deallocated before the movie gets playing. (I imagine the thumbnailImageAtTime call keeps it around for a bit longer.)
Try assigning the movie player instance to a retained (strong) instance variable or property. Of course it should be released when finished, as multiple movie player instances don't play well together.
Also, note that, as of iOS 5, calling prepareToPlay is required. The following is from chapter 28 of Matt Neuberg's Programming iOS 5, Second Edition:
Before you can display a movie in your interface with an MPMoviePlayerController, you must call prepareToPlay, which is supplied through the MPMediaPlayer protocol (adopted by MPMoviePlayerController). This requirement is new in iOS 5, and is a major difference from previous versions of the system; your old code can break if it didn’t make this call.
I want to store large number of videos in my application's directory. Will it make my application slow? Or will it take time to launch the application. I am loading videos only when necessary.
It will make large size of your application which is not good...& it will also take time to launch in place of save all ur video u can make user to download that video from server and after that it will be saved in ur doc directory so ur app will be not of large size.............
Where is it located locally
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"videoname" ofType:#"mov" inDirectory:#""]];
and play with that
MPMoviePlayerController *player = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:videoURL];
[[player view] setFrame:[self.view bounds]]; // Frame must match parent view
[self.view addSubview:[player view]];
[player play];
[player release];
EDIT:-
The exact answer to this question is NO, it will not make your App Slow,But yeah it ill take some time to load the videos in your App,Time will depend upon number of videos you are loading in your APP. The solution to this is you have to use blocks for ALAssetLibaries.
Have a look on this ALAssetLibary Apple's class reference.
It may help you if not do contact me. Thanks :)
I have in my app a tab view with many tabs, and in one of them I have a button that when is clicked, I want to show a movie stream in a view. I have this code:
NSString *moviePath = #"http://10.0.0.4/prog_index.m3u8";
theMovie = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL URLWithString:moviePath]];
[theMovie.view setFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, (self.view.frame.size.width), (self.view.frame.size.height))];
theMovie.view.backgroundColor = [UIColor grayColor];
theMovie.view.tag = 9999;
[self.view addSubview:[theMovie view]];
[theMovie play];
The view appears, but the video doesn't start. What is wrong?
You're passing to the MPMoviePlayerController an URL pointing to a m3u8 file. That is a playlist. To play media with MPMoviePlayerController, you have to set it an actual video file. You should parse the playlist to get the link to the real video and then init your MPMoviePlayerController with the real link.
Check M3U - Wikipedia and MPMoviePlayerController reference
Also check this related question
EDIT: Thanks to Hugo Silva, I realized that MPMoviePlayerController is able to play live streams in m3u8 format, since I've not seen anything wrong in your code, I suggest you to check if it's a problem of your stream. Try using one of the samples provided by Apple. Also make sure that your stream meets Apple's requirements for HTTP Streaming
I have any number of thumbnail images that, when tapped, will play a different video (fullscreen). I have never been clear on whether I should keep one MPMoviePlayerController object in my view controller and have it play whichever url according to the thumbnail that was tapped, or create a new MPMoviePlayerController each time. What is the best practice?
I am also having problems where tapping on different thumbs crashes the app, I believe because the MPMoviePlayerController tries to stream a video while it is already trying to stream. There seems to be no way to cancel a MPMoviePlayerController and clear out what it was doing, then start loading a new video.
Here's how I create it:
MPMoviePlayerController* moviePlayer = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] init];
self.player = moviePlayer;
[moviePlayer release];
Then to play a video I do this:
//would like to do something like this first - [self.player clear];
self.player.contentURL = someURL;
[self.view addSubview:player.view];
[self.player prepareToPlay];
[self.player play];
Any advice is welcome... thanks.
When you are changing the video in an MPMovieplayerController,then you can remove the mpmoviecontrollerplayer view from super view using removeFromSuperView and again add it's subview to the super view initializing it with new URL.
No need to create new object every time.
For some reason, the expand button the arrow points to in the screenshot below causes the view controller that initiated video playback to animate back over top of the video, but without stopping video playback which means you can still hear the audio even though the video is no longer visible. I've tried other movie control styles, but there are other problems with those (for example, no controls causes the player to play the entire video before dismissing, i.e. no 'Done' button).
Here is the code that initiates the video playback:
player = [[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL:movieURL];
[player setModalTransitionStyle:UIModalTransitionStyleCrossDissolve];
[[self navigationController] presentModalViewController:player animated:YES];
[[player moviePlayer] play];
Any ideas/suggestions as to how I can either disable that button or receive its notification so I can respond accordingly?
Thanks.
I can't find a solution to this, but I did find a workaround. I simply call [player stop]; in my -viewDidLoad of the calling view controller. The outcome won't be what the user expects when they press that button, but it's better than allowing the video to continue to play when they press it.