How to release MPMoviePlayerController?

Question

I have a couple of views that access the movie player. I've put the following code in a method in AppDelegate for these views. They send in the filename to play. The code works fine but I know a release is required somewhere. If I add the last line as a release or autorelease, the app will crash once the user presses done on the movieplayer.

MPMoviePlayerController *moviePlayer = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] 
                 initWithContentURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:moviePath]];
moviePlayer.movieControlMode = MPMovieControlModeDefault;
[moviePlayer play];
//[moviePlayer release];

I get this error:

objc[51051]: FREED(id): message videoViewController sent to freed object=0x1069b30

Program received signal: “EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION”.

How should I be releasing the player?

Answer 1

What I've found is that the MPMoviePlayerController has to be sent the stop message before you can safely release it. So I do it in handlePlaybackEnd - first I stop it, then I autorelease it. Calling release doesn't seem to work too well:

- (void) moviePlayBackDidFinish : (NSNotification *) notification
{
  VideoPlayerController * player = notification.object;
  [player stop];
  [player autorelease];
}

The whole thing becomes a bit trickier in that the MPMoviePlayerPlaybackDidFinishNotification can get sent more than once, but calling stop/autorlease twice won't do you any good either. So you need to guard against that somehow.

Lastly, it seems to take a few iterations of the main run loop until you can safely create a new MPMoviePlayerController instance. If you do it too quickly, you'll get sound but no video. Great fun, huh?