Putting a video to pause state before playing

Question

I am using MVMoviePlayer to play videos in the app. Right now, a black screen comes after taping the play button and the video starts playing. But, the black screen is casing some discofort from the user end point of view. So, i want to start the video from a paused state. In order to do this, i thought of putting the player to paused state before playing it..

Is there a way to do this???

Answer 1

You can hide your MPMoviePlayer until that annoying black flicker is gone.

To ensure that the black flicker is gone, you can check if the MPMoviePlayer's loadState is 3 ( which means MPMovieLoadStatePlayable | MPMovieLoadStatePlaythroughOK ) and playbackState is 1 (which means MPMoviePlaybackStatePlaying)

First hide your MPMoviePlayer:

yourMPMoviePlayer.view.hidden = YES;

Just add an observer to be notified when loadState changes:

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
                                         selector:@selector(loadStateChanged:) 
                                             name:MPMoviePlayerLoadStateDidChangeNotification
                                           object:nil];

And make your MPMoviePlayer visible again when you are notified and conditions are met:

-(void)loadStateChanged:(NSNotification *)sentNotification
{
    if ( player.loadState == 3 &&  player.playbackState == 1 )
       yourMPMoviePlayer.view.hidden = NO;
}