iphone - force MPMoviePlayerController to play video in landscape mode

Question

I have an app that is portrait mode only, but when the user plays a video I want it to play in fullscreen landscape mode (the video player doesn\'t look good in portrait mod

Answer 1

I had the same situation, but I am using iOS 6 and a NavController based project. What makes that interesting is the ViewController that is hosting the MPMoviePlayerController I don't want rotated, but I wanted the video within it to be rotated.

I just manually rotate the MPMoviePlayerController as needed based on the devices orientation. _videoView is a MPMoviePlayerController property of the ViewController. For the example, I just hard coded the desired width and height to a 16x9 aspect ratio as I intend this video to be uploaded to youtube.

- (void)updateVideoRotationForCurrentRotationWithAnimation:(bool)animation
{
    CGSize containerSize  = _videoView.frame.size;   // Container NOT rotated!
    float  videoWidth     = 384;                     // Keep 16x9 aspect ratio
    float  videoHeight    = 216;

    if( animation )
    {
        [UIView beginAnimations:@"swing" context:nil];
        [UIView setAnimationDuration:0.25];
    }

    switch( self.interfaceOrientation )
    {
        case UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait:
        case UIInterfaceOrientationPortraitUpsideDown:
            m_videoPlayer.view.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(radians(90));

            // This video player is rotated so flip width and height, but the container view
            // isn't rotated!
            [m_videoPlayer.view setFrame:CGRectMake((containerSize.width-videoHeight)/2,
                                                    (containerSize.height-videoWidth)/2,
                                                    videoHeight,
                                                    videoWidth)];
            break;

        case UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeLeft:
        case UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight:
            m_videoPlayer.view.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(radians(0));

            // This video player isn't rotated
            [m_videoPlayer.view setFrame:CGRectMake((containerSize.width-videoWidth)/2,
                                                    (containerSize.height-videoHeight)/2,
                                                    videoWidth,
                                                    videoHeight)];
            break;
    }

    if( animation )
        [UIView commitAnimations];

}


- (void)didRotateFromInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)fromInterfaceOrientation
{
    [self updateVideoRotationForCurrentRotationWithAnimation:YES];
}

I also call updateVideoRotationForCurrentRotationWithAnimation after view did appear so it has the correct initial orientation.