Playing movie downloaded with FTP in iOS

Question

I have an application that downloads movies from an ftp-server and then plays them with an MPMoviePlayerController. However the movieplayer fails with MPMovieFinishReasonPlaybackError.

the code looks like this:

NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[contents objectAtIndex:index]];
NSLog(@"url: %@",url);

self.movieController = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:url];

the nslog gives this answer:

url: file://localhost/var/mobile/Applications/E8C9DFE8-9802-4EC1-B560-3EEE96E0AF5E/Documents/media/testfilm.mov

Does anybody have an idea on how to get the movie to play? If I add the movie to the project and use the following code the movie works.

NSURL *url = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"testfilm" ofType:@"mov"]];

Answer 1

You are using fileURLWithPath: for a remote file, that is wrong.

Use URLWithString: for remote files instead.

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See the reference on that exact subject - particularly the parameters section;

URLWithString:

Creates and returns an NSURL object initialized with a provided string.

+ (id)URLWithString:(NSString *)URLString

Parameters

URLString

The string with which to initialize the NSURL object. Must be a URL that conforms to RFC 2396. This method parses URLString according to RFCs 1738 and 1808. (To create NSURL objects for file system paths, use fileURLWithPath:isDirectory: instead.) Return Value An NSURL object initialized with URLString. If the string was malformed, returns nil.

Discussion

This method expects URLString to contain any necessary percent escape codes, which are ‘:’, ‘/’, ‘%’, ‘#’, ‘;’, and ‘@’. Note that ‘%’ escapes are translated via UTF-8.