[Code Snippet] Playing video streaming in our iPhone App

Hi there. Today's code snippet is another easy one, just for playing video streaming embedded in our app using Media Player Framework.

First thing to do is to import the headers that we need

#import <MediaPlayer/MediaPlayer.h>

After that we'll have to instantiate the MPMoviePlayerController and add it as a subview to our actual view. We could set the MPMoviePlayer controller frame, to get a full screen player or not.

MPMoviePlayerController *player = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:
                                            [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/bipbopall.m3u8"]];
   
    [player.view setFrame: self.view.bounds];  // player's frame must match parent's
    [self.view addSubview: player.view];
   
    [player prepareToPlay];
    [player play];

Two things to take care:

First one: Take care about the supported stream formats for iOS, if the video streaming is not played maybe because the streaming is not transmitted in the correct formats. Review the stream formats and the best practices for iOS streaming here

Second one: Video player is another control yet, so you can add controls onto it like UILabels, UIButtons and make your streaming a bit interactive for the user. Just add the control with addView method and you can use it.

I hope this code snippet could be useful for you. Now I'm inmersed into interoperability between Microsoft Azure cloud computing framework and iPhone so it's possible that in a few weeks there are some articles about that.