How to Play Movies from the Application Bundle or from a Remote Server (URL)

In the previous two posts I wrote about how to create a movie player that would work across OS versions, as well as how to play a movie in portrait mode (on 3.2 and above) : Display iPhone Movies in Portrait Mode and Getting MPMoviePlayerController to Cooperate with iOS4, 3.2 (iPad) and Earlier Versions of iPhone SDK

For both posts, in order to create a working example that one could download and run as is, the code examples referenced a movie that I included in the application bundle. Although handy, this prompted a number of questions about how to play a movie from a remote resource.

I’ve updated the original examples for both posts, with an option to play movies from the application bundle or from a remote server.

Play Movie from Server

The first change I made was in CustomMoviePlayerViewController.m, where I added a method to initialize the movie player with a NSURL object:

- (id)initWithURL:(NSURL *)URL
{
  if (self = [super init])
  {
    movieURL = URL;
    [movieURL retain];
 
  }
  return self;
}
 
- (id)initWithPath:(NSString *)moviePath
{
  if (self = [super init])
  {
    movieURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:moviePath];    
    [movieURL retain];
  }
  return self;
}

For both methods, the end result is an initialized NSURL object.

The other code change is in TestViewController.m where I updated the loadMoviePlayer method to support calling either of the above methods:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18

- (void)loadMoviePlayer
{  
/*
  // Play movie from app bundle
  NSString *path = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"Movie-1" ofType:@"mp4" inDirectory:nil];
  moviePlayer = [[[CustomMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithPath:path] autorelease];
*/
 
  // Play movie from URL
  NSURL *movieURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://someurlsomewhere.com/movie.mp4"];
  moviePlayer = [[[CustomMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithURL:movieURL] autorelease];
 
  // Show the movie player as modal
  [self presentModalViewController:moviePlayer animated:YES];
 
  // Prep and play the movie
  [moviePlayer readyPlayer];    
}

Comment in/out the relevant code in lines 4 – 11 to swap between playing from a file in the bundle and a movie accessible on a remote server.

Download Movie Player Source Code

MoviePlayer in Landscape Mode

MoviePlayer in Portrait Mode (requires 3.2 OS and greater)