iPhone SDK Application Development

Chapter 14. Media Player Framework

The Media Player framework makes it ridiculously easy to add video and audio playing capabilities to your application. The movie player controller automatically handles the orientation changes and window transitions to play many different video formats on the iPhone’s screen. A single call to the movie controller to play the movie will automatically display the player and its controls. The application can choose which controls to display, adjust the playback position, and control the video’s play and stop functions. The movie player supports MOV, MP4, M4V, and 3GP formats, as well as many audio formats.

To use the Media Player framework, you’ll need to add it to your Xcode project. Right-click on the Frameworks folder in your project, and then choose Add Framework. Navigate to the MediaPlayer.framework folder, and then click Add.

Movie Player Controllers

The MPMoviePlayerController class is initialized with an NSURL object, which you’ve already learned about. You can instantiate the NSURL class to refer to a local file or a remote website URL. To initialize the movie player controller, use the class’s initWithContentURL method and provide an NSURL object. An example follows:

MPMoviePlayerController *moviePlayer = [ [ MPMoviePlayerController alloc ]
    initWithContentURL: [ NSURL URLWithString: @"http:// ..." ] ];

To initialize a movie player to play a local file, use the NSURL class’s fileURLWithPath method:

NSString *path = [ NSString stringWithFormat: ...