I would like to write code so that when the user presses a button, the camera is launched and records 5 seconds of video. In other words I want to have video capture but with a time limit.
Is there something inside the UIImagePickerController or other parts of the framework that would allow doing this? Thank you.
There is nothing that allows you to directly do this. But you can very easily use UIImagePickerController's startVideoCapture to begin the capture and then call stopVideoCapture 5 seconds later, for example with [picker performSelector:@selector(stopVideoCapture) withObject:nil afterDelay:5].
Or you can do basically the same thing with AVFoundation, in particular AVCaptureMovieFileOutput's startRecordingToOutputFileURL:recordingDelegate: and stopRecording methods.