Open Radar

 
MPMoviePlayerController should allow me to specify that requests should not be made on a cellular network

It should be possible to prevent people from streaming video over a cellular network if they don't want to. For example, I'm working on an app for children to watch video (on their parent's iPhones). We'd like to add a feature where parents can choose to restrict video streaming to wifi connections.

Unfortunately, this doesn't look possible. We can use SCNetworkReachability to find out which network interface is likely to be used, but as your documentation points out:

"The kSCNetworkReachabilityFlagsIsWWAN flag in the SCNetworkReachability API tells you which interface will *probably* be used if your app connects to the specified host. However, this flag can be misleading..."

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternetWeb/Conceptual/NetworkingOverview/Platform-SpecificNetworkingTechnologies/Platform-SpecificNetworkingTechnologies.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010220-CH212-SW9

The documentation goes on to suggest using NSMutableURLRequest's setAllowsCellularAccess: method to indicate that a particular request should not be allowed over a cellular interface. However, MPMoviePlayerController doesn't provide any way to set this flag on the requests it makes for video data.

Steps to reproduce:
Create a project that uses MPMoviePlayerController

Expected results:
There'd be a way to indicate that it should not allow video to be downloaded over cellular networks:

movieController.allowsCellularAccess = false


Actual results:
There is no such property.