play movie file during iphone application startup(i.e during application loading)

Question

I want to play a movie file or any animation file till the time application not loaded completely.
Is there any simple way to do it?

Answer 1

You have to think carefully about if you really want to do this. On a hardware limited device, loading a movie is going to increase load times, not reduce them as should be your goal. Even the Default.png method is meant as a way to indicate the application is loading and reduce the perceived load time to the user; it's not intended as a splash screen or eye candy.

If your application does have a very long operation during load that you absolutely can't avoid before showing a functional UI, I think the best bet might be to whip up a quick 'loading' animation using Core Animation layers. Maybe there's a better way to do it but in my experience loading the movie player takes time.

Answer 2

Depends on what you mean.

The iPhone shows a still image (Default.png) while the application loads, prior to your code getting any control.

Once your code has control, you can use MPMoviePlayer to play a video. You could launch a separate thread to do whatever takes so long that you want to hide it behind a video...

Answer 3

The only way to play a movie is to use the MPMoviePlayer. This takes over the UI and is full screen -- none of your app will show through until the movie is closed.

While it sounds cool to have a movie play while the app is loading, on the iPhone, it's really not practical. This is not something you want to do.

Answer 4

Telling other people what they want to do is questionable. My client WANTS a movie to play and it's only a 3 second movie. It's called branding and if his users don't like it, they'll tell him.

Answer 5

Have any of you guys seen Storm 8's iPhone apps? They play movies at startup and it's pretty slick. In fact a lot of games do this. It's not an unreasonable question and I'd like to know how to do it too.