iPhone Live Video Stream Media Player

Question

I'm hoping to make an app that streams live video that has a view placed on top with labels and a button on it.

From my research and testing of the http video streaming feature (available since iPhone 3.0 OS), it seems that you create a webview that points to the index html that contains the converted video stream, and this displays as a quicktime video in the app. This means that I don't have control over the Media Player that is opened. Does anyone know how you can control this?

I know that the Apple's MoviePlayer sample code shows you how to place views on top of a MediaPlayer video, but how can this be done with a http live stream?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Im now just having a problem displaying a view/label/button on top of the movieplayer video. In Apple's MoviePlayer sample project, you can add a view on top of the video with this code:

MoviePlayerAppDelegate *appDelegate = (MoviePlayerAppDelegate *)[[UIApplication sharedApplication] delegate];     

// initialize a new MPMoviePlayerController object with the specified URL, and play the movie
[appDelegate initAndPlayMovie:[self localMovieURL]];

NSArray *windows = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] windows];

if ([windows count] > 1) {
     // Locate the movie player window
     UIWindow *moviePlayerWindow = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow];

     // Add our overlay view to the movie player's subviews so it is displayed above it.
     [moviePlayerWindow addSubview:self.overlayView];
}

The overlayview is a view that contains the requested label and button. However, when I apply the same code to a movie url containing the .m3u8 file it doesn't display the overlay view e.g.http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/gear1/prog_index.m3u8

NSURL *newMovieURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/gear1/prog_index.m3u8">];

if (movieURL) {
     NSLog(@"movieURL");

     if ([movieURL scheme])     // sanity check on the URL
     { NSLog(@"[movieURL scheme]");
          [appDelegate initAndPlayMovie:newMovieURL];

          NSArray *windows = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] windows];
          NSLog(@"windows count:%d", [windows count]);

       if ([windows count] > 1) {
          UIWindow *moviePlayerWindow = [[UIApplication sharedApplication] keyWindow];
          [moviePlayerWindow addSubview:self.overlayView];
          }
     }
     else NSLog(@"![movieURL scheme]"); } else
     NSLog(@"!movieURL");

The number of windows returned is just 1, as opposed to 2 in the previous example, even though the movie plays. When I check the url to see if it was ok, the movieURL returns null, but it still plays the streamed content. I tried removing the check for window count being greater than 1 but it still didnt display the overlay view.

Does anybody know a way around this? Thanks