Custom SLider for video on iPad

Question

I have a custom UISlider and use the currentPlaybackTime to change values of an MPMoviePlayerController object.

The problem is when i scrub at a fast rate using the slider, it doesn't respond as fast as i would like..

Is there any better way to have a fast interactive scrubber for ipad? targeting from OS 3.2

Answer 1

Well there are two issues, only one you can control directly.

Multimedia-content is commonly compressed using some kind of delta-compression, hence quick and exact seeking is not a trivial task to cope with. As that is common and since you can not directly change that, you will have to live with it.

• the only way to increase responsiveness for seeking on the content-side (when encoding) is reducing the gop-size - that is, less p-frames between the i-frames.

• when using a slider or a similar control, you could, instead of directly connecting the current playback position with it, handle any manual changes in an indirect fashion. You could run a timer based job that, whenever the slider/scrubber has been moved, tries to adjust the playback position towards that new value. Once the player is seeking, prevent the scrubber from getting feedback from the current playback location but allow it once the player is in playing state again. That way the user does not directly experience the clunky seek feedback.