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
Related
I have an iPad app which has a network connection from another iPad. On the client iPad, I want to be able to take data from a NSInputStream (which comes from the server iPad), and play it in MpMoviePlayer as it downloads from the server iPad.
I know that I can download the entire video, save it to a file, and open it in media player, but I want to be able to start playing before the full file has been downloaded.
I have NOT tried saving a chunk of it to the file and playing it, then adding to the file as it becomes available in the stream, because a) the file is likely to get locked, and b) the movieplayer is likely to open the file and read it into an internal cache, so adding to the file later won't (I don't think) play the new content. I'm willing to try it down the road, if nobody has any brilliant ideas, but I give it a very low likelihood of working - I'd guess a 10% chance of success.
If MpMoviePlayer had an initWithData method, I would simply give it a NSMutableData, and add to the data as it became available to the stream, but I don't see a method like that. Does anyone have any ideas for how I can do this?
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.)
I have a webservice returning .flv file, it has to be played in iphone application, how do i play a .flv (flash file) in iphone?
Does anyone has faced this scenario? Programmatically is it possible to convert to some format and play in iphone?
Thanks.
IPhone doesn't and judging by the Apple official statements won't ever (or at least in the forseeable future) support flash content.
Converting the content to another format on the server side should be easy to do and would allow content playback on an iDevice.
SInce the video is probably already h.264 encoded inside the FLV container, you may want to try FLV Extract on the server to avoid recompression:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/FLV_Extract
Basically you just need to run it once for each of the videos on the server and keep the results around.
I would recommend setting up your webservice to use something like ffmpeg ( http://www.ffmpeg.org/ ) to convert the .flv file to an mp4 file which can be played directly from the iPhone's web browser.
Pioto and Josaih are on the right track in suggesting that you should convert the video server-side using a tool like FFMpeg. As far as I know there is zero support for flv in any part of iOS, so you'd be unable to transcode it locally. Even if you could, it would make your users angry, since transcoding is a resource-intensive process that would kill their battery life and take a significant amount of time.
So, your solution is to transcode your videos to h.264 server-side. However, I'd caution against transcoding from flv->h.264 if there are any other options available. If you have the original, uncompressed (or at least less-compressed) source video available, you'll get higher-quality video by transcoding that to h.264. Each time lossy compression (eg, squeeze or h.264) is used on a file, you lose some information and quality. If you've ever seen a 3rd or 4th generation copy of a VHS tape, you can understand what I'm getting at.
Once you have a h.264 formatted video, you can play it on iOS. Not sure about the exact details of this.
You may be able to use ffmpeg or something on your server to transcode it to H.264. I'm not so sure you would really want to do that transcoding on the phone. Given Apple's current stance on Flash, this is probably your best option.
For FLV files, what I do is I upload them on Google Drive and watch them from Google Drive app.
I need to stream an audio file which is saved on my server. Is it possible for me to stream that file in order to play it on my iPhone? Or is there any other way to play an audio file from the server to iPhone? help me please.
Thanks,
Shibin
This link was useful to me : http://cocoawithlove.com/2008/09/streaming-and-playing-live-mp3-stream.html
He's got a project linked from that page http://projectswithlove.com/projects/iPhoneStreamingPlayer.zip
In this project, interesting lines are in iPhoneStreamingPlayerViewController.m, lines 82-89 start streaming the audio from a url.
I've manged to get this running on my iPhone and tested it using an mp3 on another server and it works fine. However, I've not picked through the code so I can't help you anymore than this, sorry!
Sam
NS To get the project to compile I had to change the SDK to 3.0 - if you right click on the project name and choose Get Info, then change the option called Base SDK to iPhone Device 3.0 and it should work.
There's a couple of ways to get the file playing on the iPhone, but the first problem is that you need to decide how to serve the file from your server.
One great way is to share the file out via HTTP using a Web Server. If the server is Windows, look into 'IIS'. If it's a Mac or Linux, Apache is your friend.
Once you've got the serving going, here are the options on the iPhone:
1) Use iPhone Safari to navigate to http://your-server/your-folder/the-file.ext. If the serving is correct, it'll open the mediaplayer and stream it.
2) Write an iPhone application that uses the AVMediaPlayer framework to play the file. Non-trivial, but there are plenty of samples.
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.