Programming iOS 6, 3rd Edition

MPMoviePlayerViewController

An MPMoviePlayerViewController is, as its name implies, a view controller (a UIViewController subclass). It manages an MPMoviePlayerController (its moviePlayer) and automatically provides a fullscreen presentation of the MPMoviePlayerController’s view. Thus, an MPMoviePlayerViewController has some strong advantages of simplicity.

The documentation says that you can use an MPMoviePlayerViewController wherever you would use a UIViewController, such as a child view controller in a tab bar interface or navigation interface, but the MPMoviePlayerViewController’s own interface seems to make the most sense when it is a presented view controller. A category on UIViewController even provides a special method for presenting it, presentMoviePlayerViewControllerAnimated:, which uses a style of animation otherwise unavailable, whereby the current view slides out to reveal the movie view. To remove the view in code, you could then call dismissMoviePlayerViewControllerAnimated. Here’s a simple example:

NSURL* m = [[NSBundle mainBundle] URLForResource:@"ElMirage"
                                   withExtension:@"mp4"];
MPMoviePlayerViewController* mpvc =
    [[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL: m];
mpvc.moviePlayer.shouldAutoplay = NO; // optional
[self presentMoviePlayerViewControllerAnimated:mpvc];

In that code, I’ve set the MPMoviePlayerViewController’s moviePlayer’s shouldAutoplay property just to show that it can be done; the moviePlayer is an MPMoviePlayerController, and can be sent ...