How To Rotate An MPMoviePlayerController

Question

I am building an iPhone app that plays videos on demand from a web service.

The videos play in an MPMoviePlayerController, and everything works fine on the iPhone de

Answer 1

iPad apps are supposed to support all four interface orientations.

EDIT: I haven't managed to find official docs to cite. It might be simply that iPad apps are supposed to be able to launch in all orientations, though you can force some bits to be landscape if it's "sensible". Whether Apple rejects your app or not is another issue, but I think they're unlikely to reject a video app that plays video in landscape.

After some experimentation, the following seems to work:

@interface MyMovieViewController : MPMoviePlayerViewController
@end

@implementation MyMovieViewController
- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)toInterfaceOrientation
{
    return UIInterfaceOrientationIsLandscape(toInterfaceOrientation);
}

@end

Then just instantiate MyMovieViewController instead of MPMoviePlayerViewController.

EDIT 2: MPMoviePlayerViewController is not the same as MPMoviePlayerController; you use it to get the behaviour of the 2.0-3.1 MPMoviePlayerController. You need to add the view controller to the VC hierarchy, but it's pretty simple (and a lot easier than messing around with view transforms):

MPMoviePlayerViewController * vc = [[MyMovieViewController alloc] initWithContentURL:aUrl];
[self presentMoviePlayerViewControllerAnimated:vc];
[vc.moviePlayer play];