MPMoviePlayerController irreversibly switching to playbackState "paused"

Question

Hi all,

I'm using a single instance of MPMoviePlayerController to playback short clips (3-10 Minutes) via HTTP-Download in an iPad-Application. This usually works nicely, but in rare cases the following pattern occurs:

• A video starts playing (usually 1 up to 4 seconds of it)
• The playbackState switches to MPMoviePlaybackStatePaused. This is unrelated to the loadState. The file keeps coming and loadState indicates "playable" or even "playthroughOK".
• Hitting the play-button or calling [controller play] has no effect
• Video-Playback is broken from this point on ("broken" meaning any subsequent stream initiated with [controller setContentURL:] will almost certainly result in the same behavior)
• Video-Playback keeps being broken even after a restart of the App.
• All you can do is reboot the device.
• The defect is not tied to any particular video file breaking the app reproducably

I'd suspect my iPad used for development to be broken but some of our users experience this problem too (including temporary fix of the problem by rebooting the iPad), and are - as you might guess - not happy.

Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Any fix out there?

Answer 1

Apparently, this was an issue with iPhoneOS 3.2. After an upgrade to iPhoneOS 3.2.1 the problem went away.

Answer 2

I was facing a similar intermittent problem on the app I am working on. It would only happen sometimes and only on 2 of the ~12 iPads I was testing on - all were on iOS 3.2.2.

My video was local, but the symptoms are the same: after hitting play it would auto-pause itself and I couldn't restart it. This would persist across app restarts and would require a device restart to fix.

What finally fixed it for me was to set MPMoviePlayerController useApplicationAudioSession to NO. In my case, I was starting another audio session for something else and, in these rare instances, they were screwing each other up somehow.

Not sure if this was the same problem the original poster was having, but wanted to record my fix somewhere as the internet wasn't much help on this one and I burned some serious time figuring it out.