MPMoviePlayerController with a Custom Button on its toolbar

Question

You might have seen video through you tube in iPhone.

Normal MPMoviePlayerController has previous, next & play/pause buttons.

You tube - player has additional two buttons on it.

=> Add to favorites on the left side.

=> Email this video on right side.

I want to implement the same for my application.

But I am failed to find out the property or methods regarding - implementing this.

How do I need buttons on it?

• When User is watching video there should no buttons on screen.
• When user taps on video - a toolbar comes on top & at center
• A center tool bar has generally three buttons on it ,Previous - next -play/pause
• I want to add a button beside next button & previous button.

Answer 1

I don't think you can modify the interface of an Apple provided view.
The general approach would be to play your video and then after it's done, show a view with the desired buttons/and or options for the user.

An example of this can be seen with the YouTube app on the iPhone. After the youtube video plays, the user is sent to a summary view with links to watch the video again, favourite it, share it, etc.

Answer 2

I would say that it may be possible to just set the MPMoviePlayerController's movieControlMode property to MPMovieControlModeHidden and add a subview to it with your own collection of buttons, titles, etc... But MPMoviePlayerController inherits only from NSObject, so you couldn't do that. Perhaps you can subclass MPMoviePlayerController and setup your own stuff when play is called, yet again, I imagine MPMoviePlayerController would display itself as a modal fullscreen view and hide anything you setup. :-\

If all you're looking to do is mess with the look of the controls, I DO know that you can mess around with various objects' drawRect: methods to override how bars and buttons are drawn.

For example, setting up a category or subclass of UINavigationBar and implementing drawRect: as follows will result in a custom navigation bar being drawn:

- ( void )drawRect:( CGRect )rect
{
    [ [ UIImage imageNamed:kSTNavigationBarBackgroundImageName ] drawInRect:CGRectMake( 0.0, 0.0, self.frame.size.width, self.frame.size.height ) ];
}

This replaces Apple's standard look for their navigation bars and replaces it with a custom image asset. We do this, among other things, for our apps.