Start audio download half way through file. - soundmanager2

I was wondering if there is a way to start downloads of audio files from a start point depending on bytes or time. Right now on my website if I want to start a audio track at the half way point I have to wait for it to download past halfway and then skip to that part. Thanks!

Yes, the server has to support byte range requests and the client would have to make the appropriate request to get the bytes it needs. Most browsers support this already natively; Flash does not.
If you're using the native <audio> element and are unable to set the playback position before the entire song has downloaded then that means the server does not accept byte range requests.
Using SoundManager2 you can pass a from value when creating the sound which will start the playback from said offset (when using Flash, the entire file will still be downloaded):
soundManager.createSound({
url: 'http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/theadamcarollashow/2013.08.07ACS.mp3',
from: 10*60*1000 // position to start playback within a sound (msec): 10 minutes
});

Related

Netstream() progressive download of internal file

Hello All I have been working on a project for a while:
I have a non standard MP4 video file I want to play off a server in a IPhone App (I am using Flash builder to create it).
Due to a combination of server problems (not correctly identifying MIME type and cant be changed) and IPhone limitations (e.g. not being able to force the iplayer to play files with wrong extension), I have had to setup a process that reads the file in, saves it locally and then point the video player at the local file.
Although this sort of works, i am having an issue with some of the files that are large (94mb for a 17 min video) and a slow server - which takes 120 seconds to transfer the whole file.
I thought that if you started playing the video, then the transfer rate would be faster than the playback rate so the video would play ok.
However sometimes the video just crashes, which i am guessing is a result of the video reading beyond what has been written.
If the video played the internal file using progressive download I think it would probably not crash but resume once more date had been read but understand that progressive download is triggered by a url extension beginning with HTTP://
Can you make an internal file play using progressive download ? I know this would not normally be expected as logically the system would expect a local file to already be download ?
Any help appreciated
Thanks
Toby
try this to know download file is complete or not
HCDownload
it is very easy to use only write its delegate method.
Edit
also see StitchedStreamPlayer

iPhone MPMoviePlayerController : download files while streaming en play them locally

I've m3u8 file with all the TS files. MPMoviePlayerController play them fine via http request on the streaming server. But I'd like to get the files locally in order to play them again later without any connection.
I managed to download m3u8 file and all the TS files locally on my device, I edited m3u8 files to point to local .ts instead of http ones, but I can't read them from this emplacement.
(VLC can do it well)
Is there a way to download the segments while playing (to avoid 2 downloads) and then to play them locally with MPMoviePlayerController or else.
.m3u8 is Apple HTTP Live Streaming, right? I think what you're trying to do simply goes against the design of that technology. You should expose the original file and allow it to be downloaded.
From what I understand, it's in the design of streaming that you don't get explicit access to the pieces in order to put them back together. For instance, Netflix uses streaming via Silverlight, and one of the benefits (to Netflix) is that it protects the data from being saved as if it were downloaded. Also, since HTTP Live Streaming allows a stream to switch bitrates on the fly, it's designed such that each time slice can be encoded at any number of bitrates, and none of them is canonical.
In theory, there might be a way to collect all the slices for a particular bitrate and re-encode them into a single video. But Apple's playback APIs are not going to give you that opportunity.
Instead of HTTP Live Streaming, consider progressive download. Just serve the original video file (transcode it to something the iPhone likes if necessary). If your server is configured properly, the playback APIs will do small requests to get particular chunks of the file, rather than the whole thing in one go, and it's a close second to proper streaming. I wish I could find where I read about this so I could give the proper name for it. Amazon S3 is set up to serve this way, if you need a quick solution.
But beware, Apple's docs say,
If your app delivers video over
cellular networks, and the video
exceeds either 10 minutes duration or
5 MB of data in a five minute period,
you are required to use HTTP Live
Streaming. (Progressive download may
be used for smaller clips.)

Realtime Audio/Video Streaming FROM iPhone to another device (Browser, or iPhone)

I'd like to get real-time video from the iPhone to another device (either desktop browser or another iPhone, e.g. point-to-point).
NOTE: It's not one-to-many, just one-to-one at the moment. Audio can be part of stream or via telephone call on iphone.
There are four ways I can think of...
Capture frames on iPhone, send
frames to mediaserver, have
mediaserver publish realtime video
using host webserver.
Capture frames on iPhone, convert to
images, send to httpserver, have
javascript/AJAX in browser reload
images from server as fast as
possible.
Run httpServer on iPhone, Capture 1 second duration movies on
iPhone, create M3U8 files on iPhone, have the other
user connect directly to httpServer on iPhone for
liveStreaming.
Capture 1 second duration movies on
iPhone, create M3U8 files on iPhone,
send to httpServer, have the other
user connected to the httpServer
for liveStreaming. This is a good answer, has anyone gotten it to work?
Is there a better, more efficient option?
What's the fastest way to get data off the iPhone? Is it ASIHTTPRequest?
Thanks, everyone.
Sending raw frames or individual images will never work well enough for you (because of the amount of data and number of frames). Nor can you reasonably serve anything from the phone (WWAN networks have all sorts of firewalls). You'll need to encode the video, and stream it to a server, most likely over a standard streaming format (RTSP, RTMP). There is an H.264 encoder chip on the iPhone >= 3GS. The problem is that it is not stream oriented. That is, it outputs the metadata required to parse the video last. This leaves you with a few options.
Get the raw data and use FFmpeg to encode on the phone (will use a ton of CPU and battery).
Write your own parser for the H.264/AAC output (very hard)
Record and process in chunks (will add latency equal to the length of the chunks, and drop around 1/4 second of video between each chunk as you start and stop the sessions).
"Record and process in chunks (will add latency equal to the length of the chunks, and drop around 1/4 second of video between each chunk as you start and stop the sessions)."
I have just wrote such a code, but it is quite possible to eliminate such a gap by overlapping two AVAssetWriters. Since it uses the hardware encoder, I strongly recommend this approach.
We have similar needs; to be more specific, we want to implement streaming video & audio between an iOS device and a web UI. The goal is to enable high-quality video discussions between participants using these platforms. We did some research on how to implement this:
We decided to use OpenTok and managed to pretty quickly implement a proof-of-concept style video chat between an iPad and a website using the OpenTok getting started guide. There's also a PhoneGap plugin for OpenTok, which is handy for us as we are not doing native iOS.
Liblinphone also seemed to be a potential solution, but we didn't investigate further.
iDoubs also came up, but again, we felt OpenTok was the most promising one for our needs and thus didn't look at iDoubs in more detail.

iPhone audio streaming - saving state?

How can I save the current state of an audio file currently being streamed by my app. I want to start the song at the same place where the user left it (something like what Pandora does when listening to a song)
Right now I am getting the packet number being played. From the packet number I get the byte number and send it in the Range header field. But this does not work and returns the whole song right from the beginning.
I am using AudioFileStream and CFHTTPStream to stream the audio.
Thanks.
That's how we do it (although we use NSURLConnection). Sounds like your server isn't respecting the range header. Start debugging there -- the problem is either that your server doesn't support the range header or your client isn't sending it properly.
This really depends a lot on the capabilities of the streaming server. Most of the common streaming servers don't support range - like Shoutcast or Icecast.

Simultaneously stream and save a video?

I'm writing an app, part of which allows the user stream/play videos. I want to restrict the functionality so that they can only stream videos if they have a WiFi connection. I will then save the video so that when they have a 3G only (or lesser) connection they can't stream videos and can only replay videos that are saved on the phone.
Ideally, I'd like to get MPMoviePlayerController to stream/play the movie and then access the movie data and save it. However, the MPMoviePlayerController api doesn't seem to support access to the movie data.
I'd like to avoid and download-then-play scenario. Any ideas?
Two solutions come to mind.
Both this solutions require that the file is in a format that can be played progressive, e.g. that you don't need the whole file to be able to play it (but that would be a prerequisite anyway).
use a thread to download the data and append it to a file, and play the file from another thread. Now, that requires that you can handle EOF events in the MPMoviePlayerController and pause the playing until the cache file is appended to and then resume for the same point.
So far what I've seen people doing this it doesn't work because MPMoviePlayerController can't handle the EOF event. (not tested it my self yet) [Caching videos to disk after successful preload by MPMoviePlayerController
Skip the playing from a file and setup a local HTTP server and stream from that (on localhost). This is also not tested.
The idea is that MPMoviePlayerController would handlle the event of missing data better from a HTTP stream then from reading the file directly.
Downside might be that it is less efficient, but I think that is a minor increase in CPU. I don't know if the network interface would handle it, but I'm assuming it's not an issue.
I leave this answer as a wiki, because I don't have a working solution but I too want one.
There is a way to make this work, but you have to write your own HTTP Live Streaming downloader.
Basically, you parse the .m3u8 file (it's a pretty simple standard, but can get tricky with alternate streams and the possibility that the stream will simply drop out and need a new playlist to continue) and then download the chunks in .ts format to your local storage, say the Documents folder or Caches etc.
Then you'll have to set up a local HTTP server to allow the MPMoviePlayerController or AVPlayer to access the files over HTTP (since they won't touch a local file path), including a re-coded playlist file pointing to the local files, which you'll have to create yourself from the original playlist(s).
CocoaHTTPServer works great for this.
Once you've done all that, it works great. It's unavoidable that you get a little delay while you download the first chunk or two before presenting your local HTTP URL to the movie player, but after that you get seamless download, recording and preview playback.
Good luck!
the iPhone is using progressive download so it will not save on the device. For that you need to explicitly download it and then play the video from your local folder.