Question

I have a custom video player set up with custom controls, and I utilize MPVolumeView to provide an airplay button. When a user chooses to use AirPlay, they interact with that Apple UI and there is no event (that I can find) that says “hey, the video is now playing over AirPlay”.

The problem is that, if I close the player and reopen it, it loads the movie (load state changes to MPMovieLoadStatePlayable), I play it, and I immediately get a playback did finish notification with reason being MPMovieFinishReasonPlaybackEnded, and the video continues to try to play through AirPlay. I’m certain the movie stops and is deallocated whenever I close the player.

If anyone has any advice on how to handle this, knows some events to listen for, or has any ideas about this whatsoever, please let me know. Thanks!

Answer 1

The answer here turns out to be that, at least up to 4.3, there is no way to get an answer to this through code.

The problem in this case is how you dispose of the MPMoviePlayerController when you’re finished with it. Even if the video plays through, before you finally release it, you have to call pause and then stop. Like this:

MPMoviePlayerController *mp = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] init];

// use the player.  then when done with it:

[mp pause];
[mp stop];
[mp release];

If you don’t do this then the next time you create a MPMoviePlayerController, certain properties are somehow ghosted in the framework. Playing a video progressively caused audio from the previous mp to play while the new mp did its initial buffering. Also, if the previous video was playing over airplay, the next video would get a notification that the video finished right after it starts and some other weirdness.

Long story short, dispose of your video players with the above sequence to avoid issues with later movie players.