Disabling auto rotation for a UIView

Question

My application is composed of a toolbar and an AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer in a background UIView. I'd like to see that toolbar rotate regarding the device orientation, so in my main ViewController, I implemented the function :

- (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation
{
    return (interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait
            || interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeLeft
            || interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight);
}

This works fine, but when the interface orientation is changed, I see that the background UIView (with a video layer) is also rotating, so my video view is now playing 90 degrees left or right... Which is not really cool !
So my question is : is there any way to disable the auto-rotation animation on a specific UIView ?

I have seen one similar question to this one : Disabling autorotate for a single UIView, but the answers doesn't fit my problem, I really need the background view to do not move, not to get around the problem with a kind of "counter animation". So I decided to bring up this topic.

Any ideas ?

Thanks !

Answer 1

This post pointed in the right direction. To get an AVCaptureVideoPreviewLayer to not rotate with the device I wrapped it in a UIView and animated that view in the opposite direction:

- (void) willAnimateRotationToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)toInterfaceOrientation duration:(NSTimeInterval)duration {

    float rotation;

    if (toInterfaceOrientation==UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait) {
        rotation = 0;
    } else
    if (toInterfaceOrientation==UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeLeft) {
        rotation = M_PI/2;
    } else
    if (toInterfaceOrientation==UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight) {
        rotation = -M_PI/2;
    }

    [UIView animateWithDuration:duration animations:^{
        cameraPreview.transform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation(rotation);
        cameraPreview.frame = self.view.frame;
    }];
}

It seems a little roundabout but it animates smoothly. Other views on top of the preview layer automatically rotate as they should.