I've an application based on iOS4, with a:
MPMoviePlayerController
and this settings:
moviePlayerController.movieSourceType = MPMovieSourceTypeStreaming;
moviePlayerController.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleDefault;
Everything is working good, except that, when I present the MPMoviePlayerController view, it doesn't display controls until the video is pre-loaded.
I know in previous version of iOS (3.x), controls are displayed as soon as MPMoviePlayer is presented. Any chance to have this working in ioS4?
You have to use MPMoviePlayerViewController instead of MPMoviePlayerController.
I'm working on a video player for iPad and I'm experiencing the same behavior. However, I don't think it's much of a problem since you can't control the video until it's loaded anyway.
What you can do is fake the existence of those controls, by setting the background view.
Here's what I do:
moviePlayerController.backgroundView.backgroundColor = [UIColor blackColor];
That just makes the background view black, but you could imagine adding a UIImageView as background view that shows disabled controls, or build real controls that actually do something.
Related
So, I've tried this a number of ways with the same result.
I've tested by using a YouTube MP4 URL, such as:
This
The way I do it looks pretty much like:
self.moviePlayer = [[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL URLWithString:videoUrlString]];
And then I play the video. If I play the video and it goes fullscreen, the whole app locks up. The video player appears, but parts of the status bar (such as the time and bars) disappear leaving only the carrier name. The volume slider is only half there, and it loads indefinitely, and ignores any further touch input until I kill the app. If I rotate the iPhone, the volume slider and the rest of the status bar reappear, but it still will not respond to touch or finish loading. Screenshot of issue.
If, instead, I pass the MPMoviePlayerViewController object to a UINavigationController with presentViewController:, the app seems to hang: until I rotate, then suddenly the video appears correctly and starts playing! However, again, all touch input is ignored and the application is essentially locked.
This is one of the strangest issues I've troubleshot.
So I tried using tools others have built. I tried XCDYouTubeKit and YKMediaKit using the Youtube ID instead of the direct link, with the exact same result. After looking at their code, they both use MPMoviePlayerViewControllers.
What's happening here? Can anyone help me figure out what's wrong?
That's surprising. Have you tried playing around with AV Foundation? It's a more modern media API than MediaPlayer.framework.
If you can target iOS 8 only, then AVPlayerViewController is a simple way to playback media via AVPlayer.
Using MPMoviePlayerController, if I make a fullscreen video with ControlStyleFullscreen, then I close it, then I instantiate a new one, the progress bar is gone from the controls in iOS 8 in the second one. This happens 100% of the time. Has anyone else encountered this? Is this an iOS bug? It still happens in 8.2.
Another way to reproduce: using an embedded video with ControlStyleEmbedded, if I run the following code, the progress bar also disappears. Note that the code is intended to force the controls to show after a programmatic pause:
[self.videoPlayer pause];
self.videoPlayer.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleNone;
self.videoPlayer.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleEmbedded;
I'm finding it difficult to search for this, background video searches for iOS typically refer to multitasking and switching apps with video.
I want to know if it's possible to have a video playing full screen without movie player controls, while displaying another view on top of that with logo, buttons, text, etc...
So,
Background: 15 second video loop -
Foreground: login / signup buttons, logo, etc...
There are a number of options, but the simplest will be to use a MPMoviePlayerController, with its repeatMode property set to loop forever, and its controlStyle set to none. That will give you a view with a looped movie with no controls that you can use as a background by adding it to your view hierarchy.
OP here - I was able to display a video full screen using this code (in viewDidLoad):
(don't forget to substantiate player as a property with MPMoviePlayerController *player;)
player = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"videoname" ofType:#"m4v"]]];
[player.view setFrame: self.view.bounds];
player.repeatMode = MPMovieRepeatModeOne;
player.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleNone;
[myView addSubview:player.view];
[player play];
And that worked fine - it displays a video fullscreen without video controls. What I had a problem with was displaying buttons and graphics above that. Even though my view hierarchy had the player.view seemingly behind my view with buttons, I couldn't get the buttons to appear.
I fixed that by adding in:
[player.view addSubview:overlayView];
Just set the layer you intend to display above the video to an IBOutlet and then use the video view to add that view (overlayView in this case) as a subview.
I actually prefer a way that is portrayed in this tutorial
basically the idea is to create a gif of your video, crop it to iPhone Screen size and load it into an un-interactive UIWebView. I believe this will get the job done if you don't need any audio, and it's basically done effortlessly.
I hope it helps you =)
I have an MPMoviePlayerController where I load a video from a URL. In iOS 3.2.2 the video started downloading when I added it to a view, but it didn't play until I hit the play button (which is what I want). However, since iOS 4.2.1 came out, it started behaving differently; the video starts downloading and plays automatically.
Here's how I load my MPMoviePlayerController:
MPMoviePlayerController *player = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc]
initWithContentURL:[NSURL URLWithString:theVideo.fileUrl]];
player.view.frame = articleVideoFrame;
[mainView addSubview:player.view];
I even tried to perform a [player pause]; after the addSubview part, but it still plays automatically. Could you guys help me with this one?
Got it! I used player.shouldAutoplay = NO; and that did the trick. Documentation says it is by default YES, which explains it all. Probably in 3.2 default was NO, but has been switched in 4.2.
I have noticed some other behavior changes in video playback in 4.2.1...namely the video player does not become visible until it starts receiving the data for the movie...
In the previous versions it used to come up instantaneously with "Loading movie..." text on top.
Sometimes, the player gets stuck in when not in full screen mode, with no Done button available or not responding to touches on Pause and Zoom...
I am having other more subtle issues with the playback but I can't isolate the issue just yet...
I recorded a video with a bluescreen. We have the software to convert that video to a transparent background. What's the best way to play this video overlaid on a custom UIView? Anytime I've seen videos on the iPhone it always launches that player interface. Any way to avoid this?
Don't know if anyone is still interested in this besides me, but I'm using GPUImage and the Chromakey filter to achieve this^^ https://github.com/BradLarson/GPUImage
EDIT: example code of what I did (may be dated now):
-(void)AnimationGo:(GPUImageView*)view {
NSURL *url = [[NSBundle mainBundle] URLForResource:#"test" withExtension:#"mov"];
movieFile = [[GPUImageMovie alloc] initWithURL:url];
filter = [[GPUImageChromaKeyBlendFilter alloc] init];
[movieFile addTarget:filter];
GPUImageView* imageView = (GPUImageView*)view;
[imageView setBackgroundColorRed:0.0 green:0.0 blue:0.0 alpha:0.0];
imageView.layer.opaque = NO;
[filter addTarget:imageView];
[movieFile startProcessing];
//to loop
[imageView setCompletionBlock:^{
[movieFile removeAllTargets];
[self AnimationGo:view];
}];
}
I may have had to modify GPUImage a bit, and it may not work with the latest version of GPUImage but that's what we used
You'll need to build a custom player using AVFoundation.framework and then use a video with alpha channel. The AVFoundation framework allows much more robust handeling of video without many of the limitations of MPMedia framework. Building a custom player isn't as hard as people make it out to be. I've written a tutorial on it here:
http://www.sdkboy.com/?p=66
I'm assuming what you're trying to do is actually remove the blue screen in real-time from your video: you'll need to play the video through OpenGL, run pixel shaders on the frames and finally render everything using an OpenGL layer with a transparent background.
See the Capturing from the Camera using AV Foundation on iOS 5 session from WWDC 2011 which explains techniques to do exactly that (watch Chroma Key demo at 9:00). Presumably the source can be downloaded but I can't find the link right now.
The GPUImage would work, but it is not perfect because the iOS device is not the place to do your video processing. You should do all your on the desktop using a professional video tool that handles chromakey, then export a video with an alpha channel. Then import the video into your iOS application bundle as described at playing-movies-with-an-alpha-channel-on-the-ipad. There are a lot of quality and load time issues you can avoid by making sure your video is properly turned into an alpha channel video before it is loaded onto the iOS device.
Only way to avoid using the player interface is to roll your own video player, which is pretty difficult to do right. You can insert a custom overlay on top of the player interface to make it look like the user is still in your app, but you don't actually have control of the view. You might want to try playing your transparent video in the player interface and see if it shows up as transparent. See if there is a property for the background color in the player. You would want to set that to be transparent too.
--Mike
I'm not sure the iPhone APIs will let you have a movie view over the top of another view and still have transparency.
You can't avoid launching the player interface if you want to use the built-in player.
Here's what I would try:
get the new window that is created by MPMoviePlayerController (see here)
explore the view hierarchy in that window, using [window subviews] and [view subviews]
try to figure out which one of those views is the actual player view
try to insert a view BEHIND the player view (sendSubviewToBack)
find out if the player supports transparency or not.
I don't think you can do much better than this without writing your own player, and I have no idea if this method would work or not.
Depending on the size of your videos and what you're trying to do, you could also try messing around with animated GIFs.
if you could extract the frames from your video and save them as images then your video could be reproduced by changing the images. Here is an example of how you could reproduce your images so that it looks like a video:
in this image that I uploaded the names of the images have a different name but if you name your images as: frame1, fram2, fram3.... then you could place that inside a loop.
I have never tried it I just know it works for simple animations. Hope it works.