Question

When viewing images my application hums along nicely with low memory consumption, once I try to watch a video using MPMoviePlayerController memory usage spikes way up, dwarfing the previous memory graph and if I play the video it causes a ‘memory warning. Level=1’ message. The video files (mp4) aren’t even that big, 40MB or so, and it doesn’t matter if I play the file streamed from a URL or loaded from a local file, actually the memory spike is even worse if I try to stream it.

Here is the code I use to create the player:

        if (_photo.videoPath != nil) {
            _movieViewController=[[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:_photo.videoPath]];
        } else {
            _movieViewController=[[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL URLWithString:_photo.videoURL]];
        }

        [[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(videoMetaListener:)
                                                     name:MPMovieDurationAvailableNotification object:_movieViewController.moviePlayer];
        _movieViewController.moviePlayer.scalingMode=MPMovieScalingModeAspectFit; 
        _movieViewController.moviePlayer.shouldAutoplay = YES;
        _movieViewController.moviePlayer.controlStyle = MPMovieControlStyleEmbedded;

Anybody else running into issues playing video? Also I checked for leaks, there are none reported.

Answer 1

Turns out this is a bug in the simulator. On the device the memory usage is normal.