iPad SDK: Embedded YouTube movie plays fullscreen version behind UIWebView

Question

I have a UIWebview within a UIScrollView. Within the webview I have an embedded YouTube movie. When I play the YouTube movie everything works fine, however, when I press the fullscreen button the movie starts playing behind the webview. Bringing the WebView to the front does not work, because I want the scrolling capabilities of the ScrollView to do horizontal scrolling.

Answer 1

Basically, you want to be able to detect when a movie starts playing fullscreen and arrange your views appropriately. Then, when the fullscreen playback ends you want to be able to get your views back to how they are.

The problem is there's no documented way to hook into or detect when a UIWebView triggers video playback in full screen.

I said 'documented way', because there are some notifications you can use to detect when a UIWebView triggers fullscreen playback. You can just listen out for them and rearrange your views accordingly. However, I don't necessarily recommend this, because they're undocumented and subject to change (in fact, they have a spelling mistake in them up until iOS 4.3, see answers below).

// For iOS 4.3 and above:
UIMoviePlayerControllerDidEnterFullscreenNotification
UIMoviePlayerControllerDidExitFullscreenNotification   

// For iOS 4.2 and below:
UIMoviePlayerControllerDidEnterFullcreenNotification
UIMoviePlayerControllerDidExitFullcreenNotification   // (note spelling mistake)

Finding these out was a bit of a pain - there are actually several more notifications that get triggered when a YouTube video in a UIWebView gets played back. To find them out you'll need to drop a breakpoint on all posting of notifications, and then manually inspect the memory locations of those notifications to figure out their string names. I don't actually think anyone has pulled these out before, because when I google them I get nothing. But they do work, promise!

I hope being able to get notified when the fullscreen playback is entered/exited will be helpful, with the massive caveat that Apple could change this undocumented behavior at any time. Your app won't get rejected outright for using them (because you're not calling any undocumented methods), and I've used it in shipping apps. But it's still not the best idea in the world...may be the only option you have though.

Edit: To clarify, based off the comment below: they're not constants, so you'd need to put them in quotes if you were registered for notifications.