Play YouTube videos with MPMoviePlayerController instead of UIWebView
The only way to have a youtube video play inside your own app is to create a UIWebView with the embed tag from Youtube for the movie you want to play as the UIWebView's content. UIWebView will detect that the embedded object is a Youtube link, and the web view's content will be the youtube preview for the video. When your user clicks the preview, the video will be shown in an MPMoviePlayerController. This is the technique described at the link that Muxecoid provided (how to play youtube videos within an application), and this is (as far as I know of) the only way to have a youtube video play within an application. You can still have the Youtube application launch by passing the youtube URL to -[UIApplication openURL:], but of course this closes your own application which is often undesirable.
Unfortunately, there's no way to directly play a youtube video with MPMoviePlayerController because youtube does not expose direct links to the video files.
If you are using Code:
- (void)embedYouTube:(NSString*)url frame:(CGRect)frame { NSString* embedHTML = @"\ <html><head>\ <style type=\"text/css\">\ body {\ background-color: transparent;\ color: white;\ }\ </style>\ </head><body style=\"margin:0\">\ <embed id=\"yt\" src=\"%@\" type=\"application/x-shockwave-flash\" \ width=\"%0.0f\" height=\"%0.0f\"></embed>\ </body></html>"; NSString* html = [NSString stringWithFormat:embedHTML, url, frame.size.width, frame.size.height]; if(videoView == nil) { videoView = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:frame]; [self.view addSubview:videoView]; } [videoView loadHTMLString:html baseURL:nil]; }Source:
Make sure that you test it on device and not on the simulator. Since simulator will always display question mark with blue box (it doesn't have quick-time player).
As I wrote above in my comment I had to do this in a project I was working on. I've solved this problem and submitted the code on github.
You can check the source and fork it here.
It basically takes a youtube url and gets all the iOS compatible video urls.
Hope this is to any help!
Cheers