Add Custom Controls to MoviePlayer

Question

I am trying to figure out how to add a custom control to the iPhone MoviePlayer. For an example of what I am trying to do see the following image.

I am trying to add something like the controls on the right and left of the basic movie controls.

I had done this in the Open SDK by adding a subclass to the playerview, but now in the official SDK and Apple moving to MPMoviePlayerController I am not sure how to do it.

Also with my old 1.x firmware way it required me to capture touch events and hide/show the control myself. I am hoping there is a way that would do this with the standard controls, but if not, that is fine.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I found the BEST way to do this!

You create your movie player like normal and then do the following:

id vvController = [theMovie videoViewController];
[[vvController _overlayView] addSubview:mainView];

Where 'mainView' is your custom overlay. Doing this makes it so your custom overlay will show and hide with the normal overlays as they are now one in the same!

Please note that this is still using the standard frameworks, but it is undocumented in the frameworks. So it should be 100% appstore safe, but "could" change without notice from Apple in later frameworks.

Answer 2

Folks here have probably also seen in various other blog posts the following approach to "get the movie-player window" -- at index = 1. Though this approach (see snippet below) is also possibly a bit "fragile", it's likely a bit "safer" since it does not make use of any undocumented or non-public methods in MPMoviePlayerController.

Note also that you should wait until you get a MPMoviePlayerContentPreloadDidFinishNotification, so that the movie-player window (idx=1) will indeed exist ;-)

Note I'm also assigning an arbitrary (integer-valued) view "tag" to myOverlayView here -- so that I can re-use the view when possible, i.e. check if it's already been added to the parent player window.

anyhoo, here's the relevant code-snippet:

// use slight "hack" to get our (parent) movie-player window, should always (?) be the UIWindow at index = 1
//
UIWindow *moviePlayerWindow= [[[UIApplication sharedApplication] windows] objectAtIndex:1];

myOverlayView.center = CGPointMake(
                            moviePlayerWindow.bounds.size.width - (myOverlayView.bounds.size.height / 2) - myOverlayView.display_origin.y,
                            moviePlayerWindow.center.y
                                  ); // center our overlay-view

myOverlayView.hidden = NO; // and show it

if( [moviePlayerWindow viewWithTag: MY_OVERLAY_VIEW_TAG] == nil ) {
    // haven't added our overlay-view as a sub-view to the main MoviePlayer window yet... so do that now
    myOverlayView.tag = MY_OVERLAY_VIEW_TAG;
    [moviePlayerWindow addSubview: myOverlayView];
}
[moviePlayerWindow bringSubviewToFront: myOverlayView]; // in any case, bring it to the foreground