Question

I am trying to implement video into my app and I am having a hard time. I have tried this tutorial and it was super helpful.

But now when I try to run my app and click on the button, the video frame comes up and just stays black. My video is in the correct format, I also made sure that I am pulling in the MediaPlayer Framework. Has anyone ran into this issue before or knows why this would be happening?

This is what I have:

-(IBAction)playMovie:(id)sender
{
    UIButton *playButton = (UIButton *) sender; 

    NSString *filepath   =   [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"big-buck-bunny-clip" ofType:@"m4v"];

    NSURL    *fileURL    =   [NSURL fileURLWithPath:filepath];
    MPMoviePlayerController *moviePlayerController = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:fileURL];

    [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
                                             selector:@selector(moviePlaybackComplete:)
                                                 name:MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishNotification
                                               object:moviePlayerController];

    [moviePlayerController.view setFrame:CGRectMake(38, 100, 250, 163)];

    [self.view addSubview:moviePlayerController.view];
    //moviePlayerController.fullscreen = YES;

    moviePlayerController.initialPlaybackTime = 5;

    [moviePlayerController play];

}

Answer 1

Have you added MPMoviePlayerController‘s view onto your view?

MPMoviePlayerController *movieController = ...;
movieController.view.frame = self.view.bounds;
[self.view addSubview:movieController.view];

Frame could also be black if you’ve set shouldAutoplay to YES and controlStyle to MPMovieControlStyleNone

–Edit
This is how I init my player and it works, maybe that will be of some help. It’s playing HTTP Live Streaming video, but it’ll play anything you put into it. You should try the url in this sample. If it’ll work then there’s definitely some problem with your contentUrl.

  url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/bipbopall.m3u8"];
  self.moviePlayerController = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:url];
  moviePlayerController.view.frame = self.view.bounds;
  [self.view insertSubview:moviePlayerController.view atIndex:0];
  moviePlayerController.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleNone;
  moviePlayerController.shouldAutoplay = YES;
  [moviePlayerController prepareToPlay];