I want to play the video simultaneously while it is downloading via unitywebrequest. Will AVPro video support this? If so please provide me some guidance, as i am new to unity and avpro video. I can able to play the video which is downloaded fully through FullscreenVideo.prefab in AVPro demo. Any help will be much appreciated.
There are two main options you could use for displaying the video while it is still downloading.
Through livestream
You can stream a video to AVPro video using the "absolute path or URL" option on the media player component, then linking this to a stream in rtsp, MPEG-DASH, HLS, or HTTP progressive streaming format. Depending on what platforms you will be targeting some of these options will work better than others
A table of which file format supports what platform can be found in the AVProVideo Usermanual that is included with AVProVideo from page 12 and onwards.
If you want to use streaming you also need to set the "internet access" option to "required" in the player settings, as a video cannot stream without internet access.
A video that is being streamed will automatically start/resume playing when enough video is buffered.
This does however require a constant internet connection which may not be ideal if you're targeting mobile devices, or unnecessary if you're planning to play videos in a loop.
HLS m3u8
HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) works by cutting the overall stream into shorter, manageable hunks of data. These chunks will then get downloaded in sequence regardless of how long the stream is. m3u8 is a file format that works with playlists that keeps information on the location of multiple media files instead of an entire video, this can then be fed into a HLS player that will play the small media files in sequence as dictated in the m3u8 file.
using this method is usefull if you're planning to play smaller videos on repeat as the user will only have to download each chunk of the video once, which you can then store for later use.
You can also make these chunks of video as long or short as you want, and set a buffer of how many chunks you want to have pre-loaded. if for example you set the chunk size to 5 seconds, with a buffer of 5 videos the only loading time you'll have is when loading the first 25 seconds of the video. once these first 5 chunks are loaded it will start playing the video and load the rest of the chunks in the background, without interrupting the video (given your internet speed can handle it)
a con to this would be that you have to convert all your videos to m3u8 yourself. a tool such as FFMPEG can help with this though.
references
HLS
m3u8
AVPro documentation
Related
I am trying to save any m3u8 stream playlist as video to disk as 1 complete video file, similar to vlc. I can create an AVAsset and play it in an AVPlayer fine, however the m3u8 links i have tried all return false from asset.isExportable so using AVAssetExportSession does not work. I thought it might be possible opening the link as an InputStream and then writing it to an OutputStream but was lost on how to do this. Is this a viable option or will it only return the actual m3u8 file instead of the .ts video links? Any guidance in the right direction would be appreciated. I am fine doing the research on how to use the different classes, i'm just kinda lost on where to go from here.
Thank you,
Phil
Building a single video from all the streams in a m3u8 playlist may not actually give you what you want, depending on the m3u8 file.
This is because m3u8 playlists can contain multiple bit rate versions for a single video - so if you added them all together you would get the same video with different quality levels (bit rates) one after another.
Its also worth noting that some videos streams will be encrypted, in fact most high value streams such as Netflix etc will be, so downloading them will not allow you to play them back unless you do it as part of the providers own 'download and go' service.
Finally, some services may make it hard for you to access the streams by requiring some form of authentication in parallel with the video stream URL.
Assuming all the above is fine or does not apply in your case, then the video files themselves can be downloaded as files using a HTTP downloading function. Good examples of these exist such as: https://stackoverflow.com/a/35510812/334402
I am trying to create a streaming video DVR like functionality in an app I am developing. I have an HTTP Live Stream that I have successfully gotten to play on the iPad. I want the user to be able to push the "Record" button, and begin recording the video that is currently playing from that point. This video file will be accessible from the app or from the camera roll. Currently, I am using the MPMoviePlayerController object to play the video stream. I do not see any methods of accessing the data from the object in Apple's documentation. Here are some thoughts I had on ways of going about this.
1) Somehow access the video data from MPMoviePlayerController, and write this to a file. Or use another type of player object that will allow me to play the video and access the currently playing data.
2) Implement some sort of screen capture recording that gets a video capture of the iPad's screen. This would allow me to record the video in a "screenshot" sort of way.
3) Locate the HTTP Live Streaming video segments where they are stored by MPMoviePlayerController. Presumably they need to be stored somewhere on the iPad for playback. Is there a way of accessing these files?
4) Manually download the stream video segments over http while streaming the file. This seems like its not ideal since the stream would have to be downloaded twice.
5) This could work. Periodically download the video segments to the iPhone. Set up a local http server on the iPhone and server the videos to the MPMoviePlayerController. This way the video segments could be marked for recording and assembled into a video.
6) I do have control of the streaming server. I could write some server side code to record the video on the server end, then send the video to the iPad after the fact. I would rather not do this.
Has anyone done any of these things? Ideally the iPhone would just be able to access the video data somehow and easily record it. I would rather not get into options 4, 5, or 6 (above) if I don't have to.
Thanks in advance.
DVR on the device is somewhat not encouraged, due to the limited space available and other factors like battery life, processing power, cleanup procedures after the user stops the dvr, etc.
If you want to achieve DVR playback on iOS devices (or other devices using HLS), I suggest you keep the video server side. The live stream is already captured and segmented server side, all you would have to do is keep the segments a bit longer, instead of deleting them. By using the EXT-X-PLAYLIST-TYPE and EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE tags, you can suggest to the player that he's opening a live stream which has DVR (earlier) video available.
Alternatively, you can use a server that does that out of the box, for example Wowza. Here's an article on how to achieve this with Wowza
If I have a video streaming server (e.g. IIS Media Services) with a live video streaming, I want the user to select from a list of interesting parts of that video and then play just that bit.
For example, if I'm interested in a 25s clip 20m into the full length I want to jump to that bit and then close the video player at the end.
(Answering my own question until someone betters it.)
There is an AVPlayer in the AVFoundation framework that can be used when you're after more sophisticated playback functionality.
On the IIS side, there is something called a PlayList that can be used to chunk up content that may work as an alternative.
What technology is used for live streaming of video from iPhone cam to a distant server.
I want to show live streaming as well as save the video, once it gets finished.
The way its being done right now is by capturing the frames as the movie is taken (right now its being done through a screenshot private api, but now with 4.0 u can grab the frame of videos a better way, cant discuss that right now tho), then take some number of frames, encode them using ffmpeg or some ohter encoding library, send the video chunks to your server and live stream them using the live http streaming...thats a birdeye view of how its being done..hope it helps
I'm building some YouTube search functionality into an iPhone app and want to ensure that I only receive results that will be playable on the device. According to the Searching for videos section in the API reference doc this seems to be relatively straightforward:
The format parameter specifies that videos must be available in a particular video format. Your request can specify any of the following formats:
I've tried setting "format=1" to limit to:
RTSP streaming URL for mobile video playback. H.263 video (up to 176x144) and AMR audio.
This provides a high proportion of playable videos but some are still unplayable and I'm worried that it's not returning others that would be playable.
When I leave the format field blank I receive an even higher proportion of non-streamable URLs.
This does not sound appropriate. My understanding is that iPhone does not stream RTSP rather it supports Apple's HTTP Streaming of segmented files for live and HTTP streaming of MPEG4 video files via range requests. I'd also expect the video to be H.264 and AAC audio.
Your setting sounds appropriate for low-end cellphones In particular, the 176x144 is a QCIF resolution commonly used on non-smartphones.
When you look at the XML file returned by a call to
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/<your video id>
then you will notice that videos which are not playable on the iPhone will have the following tag:
<yt:state name='restricted' reasonCode='limitedSyndication'>Syndication of this video was restricted by its owner.</yt:state>
Just make sure to look for the above tag and ignore the video if the tag is present.