Flex mobile project for IOS, server side proxy - iphone

Question

I am trying to write an iphone app that loads a video from an inbuilt web server running off a camera (connect to iphone via wifi).
I am using flash builder / flex mobile project - not particularly familiar but finding it easier to understand than xcode !!
The files from the camera have the wrong file extension so will not play on the ios video app, can I set up a server side proxy in flex mobile and use this to alter the file extension and then pass this link to the ios video app ?
If so any help anybody could give me ( examples etc) would be really grateful received , I have been trying to get round this problem for a couple of weeks .
Cheers
Toby

Answer 1

I can explain, conceptually, what a server side proxy would do in this case. Let's say you are retrieving a URL, like this:
http://myserver.com/somethingSomething/DarkSide/
to retrieve a video stream from the server. You say it won't be played because there is no file extension; so you have to, in essence, use a different URL with the extension. Set up 'search engine friendly' URLs on the server. And do something like this:
http://myserver.com/myProxy.cfm/streamURL/somethingSomething%5CDarkSide/Name/myProxyVid.mp4
Here is some information on how to deal with Search Engine Friendly URLs in ColdFusion. Here is some information on how to deal with Search Engine Friendly URls in PHP. I'm sure Other technologies will come up in a Google Search.
In the URL above; this is what you have:
http://myserver.com/: This is your server
myProxy.cfm: This is your server side file; that is a proxy
streamURL/somethingSomething%5CDarkSide/Name/myProxyVid.mp4: This is the query string. It consists of two name value pairs. The first is the streamURL. This is the URL you want to retrieve with your proxy. The second is just random; but as long as it ends with the file extension .mp4 the URL should be seen as an 'mp4 file'
The code behind your myProxy.cfm should be something like this, in psuedo-code:
Parse URL Query String
Retrieve Stream.
Set mimeType on return value.
Return stream data
I used a similar approach on TheFlexShow.com to track the number of people who watch our screencast on-line vs downloading it first. I also used the same approach to keep track of impressions of advertiser's banner ads. For example, the browser can't tell that this is not a JPG image:
http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/mediaDisplay.cfm?mediaid=51
Based on this, and one of your previous questions; I am not convinced this is the best solution, though. I make a lot of assumptions here. I assume that the problem with playing the file does relate to the extension and not the file data. I assume that you are not actually streaming video with an open connection on both client and server to send data back and forth.