Play Video immediately when UIView is loaded - objective-c

Question

Howdy! I'm writing an iPad app, and I need to be able to play a video when a UIView loads. However, I was getting a BAD_EXC_ACCESS if I try to message my MPMoviePlayerController anywhere after I initialize it. I removed the MPMediaPlayerController from my *.h file, then declared it entirely in the implementation file, and now I'm getting the message at the bottom below my code. There are no issues in Build and Analyze about memory leaks (or any issues, for that matter), and I cannot find any posts about this. Here's my code:
- (id)initWithNibName:(NSString *)nibNameOrNil bundle:(NSBundle *)nibBundleOrNil {
self = [super initWithNibName:nibNameOrNil bundle:nibBundleOrNil];
if (self) {
}
NSString *url = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"p0600c0100cmpintro" ofType:#"m4v"];
MPMoviePlayerController *movie = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:url]];
NSLog(#"%#", movie);
movie.view.frame = CGRectMake(5, 0, 1035, 768);
movie.view.contentMode = UIViewContentModeScaleToFill;
[[movie view] setCenter:CGPointMake(movie.view.center.x-10, movie.view.center.y)];
[movie setControlStyle:MPMovieControlStyleNone];
[movie setShouldAutoplay:YES];
[[self view] addSubview:[movie view]];
return self;
}
The NSLog of "movie" gives "MPMoviePlayerController: 0x1b77f0", but then the error message upon crash is "* -[MPMoviePlayerController playbackState]: message sent to deallocated instance 0x1473a0". Help?

Answer 1

According to the documentation it looks like the frame of the movie view needs to match the view of its parent. Also try moving your code out of the initWithNibName:bundle: into viewDidLoad:
- (void)viewDidLoad {
[super viewDidLoad];
UIView *movieContainer = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(5, 0, 300, 400)];
//Do any other positioning of the view you would like
NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:#"p0600c0100cmpintro" ofType:#"m4v"];
NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path];
MPMoviePlayerController *movie = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:url];
movie.view.frame = movieContainer.bounds; //Make sure this is the bounds of its parent view
movie.scalingMode = MPMovieScalingModeFill;
movie.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleNone;
movie.shouldAutoplay = YES;
[movieContainer addSubview:movie.view];
[self.view addSubview:movieContainer];
[movieContainer release];
}
One last suggestion would be to keep a reference of the movie so that you can dealloc it once the view controller gets deallocated

Answer 2

I would suggest creating your MoviePlayer in viewDidLoad, then in viewDidAppear make the movie play, for best results.

Answer 3

Alright, so I have another MPMoviePlayerController instance which was being deallocated earlier, but when I try to create another instance of MPMoviePlayerController, all the messages sent to this one were being sent to the deallocated instance, resulting in the memory problem. So I just removed the part where I released the first instance, and it works perfectly fine. My question now is this: is there a way to deallocate this first instance so that it isn't a burden on memory when it isn't needed? I feel that there should be a more elegant solution to this problem. I will need to play videos frequently in this application.

Answer 4

I found the solution a number of weeks ago and forgot about this post. I wasn't successfully releasing the MPMoviePlayerController. For those curious, in order to release an MPMoviePlayerController, we must first remove the notification from the NSNotificationCenter (if one was set), stop the movie (even if it's done playing), THEN release it. I wasn't doing this earlier in the application with my first MPMoviePlayerController, so it was trying to reference the deallocated instance. When the movie is done playing, here is the code to release the movie successfully:
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] removeObserver:self name:MPMoviePlayerPlaybackStateDidChangeNotification object:movie];
[movie.view removeFromSuperview];
[movie stop];
[movie release];