Question

I ran into a problem… perhaps someone bumped into something similar: I have an application that uses a MPMoviePlayerController, and used to work perfectly well.
Trying to compile and run it with new Xcode 4.2 using iPhone 5 Simulator, MPMoviePlayerController is not sending notifications when I load a movie. Looks like it fails to properly detect the video file.
The code looks more or less like that (simplified code):

// First I'm initializing the player with a URL from a file
MPMoviePlayerController *player;
player = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] init];
player.shouldAutoplay = NO;
NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:path];
player.contentURL = url;

// Then I'm adding an observer in order to wait for the player to find movie duration
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(durationAvailable:)

After the above, I’m waiting in a loop for the notification to get called, by waiting for about 10 seconds, during which I’m calling the run loop.
Using the same code, same Xcode 4.2 version, but with iPhone 4.3 Simulator, after about a second the notification gets called, and I can read the player duration. However, when running the exact same code on iPhone 5 Simulator, the notification function never gets called, and if I try to read the movie duration afterwards it contains 0.

Any idea?

Thanks,
Ariel

Answer 1

OK, I managed to find a workaround to the problem.
Apparently, adding this line after adding the observer does the trick:

[player pause];

It looks like if you don’t “activate” the player somehow, the notifications will not be fired. In my case, I just wanted to get a notification for the duration of the movie without starting a playback, and it worked well in versions prior to iOS5, but it looks like they changed the behavior. Anyway, the above line solves the problem.

Ariel