We are in the stage of designing our audio application, and we need to support uploading audio files from desktop applications to a cloud server, and also playing those audio files in the desktop applications.
How should we process the file before uploading? should be turn them into base 64 thus increasing their size by ~ 30%?
Or should we upload it as a raw binary file?
What about the different audio formats, should we transcode it in the client / server into mp3 or something like that?
Does anybody know what is the SoundCloud approach in this case?
Thank you!
SoundCloud stores the original file, and it transcodes the original for streaming purposes. The original can be downloaded if the owner makes that option available.
If you use HTTP to communicate with your server you'll need to encode with Base64. If you choose the right framework, this should be easy and possibly transparent to you.
Related
I am attempting to stream a video, in a format unity3d can access, like an mjpg. I have gone through several possible solutions, including gstreamer(only does client side as far as I could tell by the examples), yawcam(I couldn't find a way to access the image directly), and silverlight(due to simply not being able to find how the heck webcam streaming was doable) I am currently just looking for any more methods of getting video over from one side to the other. Could I possibly simply read the images into a byte array and send it over a socket? Maybe I missed something in the previous three possible solutions?
If you are looking to stream video from a server than you can use Ogg encoding + WWW.movie to map it to a texture. Assuming you have a Pro license, as I think this is a Pro only feature. If this is a local file, either bundled with the app or in external folder, we use the brilliant AVPro Windows Media or AVPro QuickTime. MJPEG does offers super smooth scrubbing with AVPro but generates enormous files. Definitely not ideal for streaming or even download!
Finally RenderHead also has a Live Camera capture plugin that could meet your needs.
I want to encode the audio file (mp3, mp4, m4a, ogg) for the streaming and want to play (I want to play encoded file smoothly) using the HTML5 player but I think HTML5 player.
So now what I am doing, I am uplaoding a file and econding this file on windows Azure Media Services using the preset "AAC Good Quality Audio". It encode the file with .mp4 file format and then I create SAS locator to run this file, it works well but the problem is that user can download it too which I don't want to allow.
If I create the OnDemandOrigin locator of the same encoded asset, it gives me 404 erroe. It means we can not play it.
Below are the steps that I have used to upload the file on Azure Media Services:
Created the empty assest.
Upload the file into the asset.
Then create the new task job to encode the audio file.
I have successfully encoded the file but when I try to generate the origin url it generate the url but when I browse the file I get
the error 404.
My queries:
"AAC Good Quality Audio" preset is the right for my task?
How can I restrict the user to download the file, if I use sas locator.
Is it possible to play the encoded file using origin locator.
Can I encode audio files for smooth streaming ? If I can then which player I should use to run the encoded file for all browsers, IOS devices and android devices.
If you want further details please feel free to ask me.
Awaiting your response.
Thanks
If your user is able to listen to the audio you're publishing, they will also be able to download the file. This you can not prevent. At best, you can make it difficult, but not impossible. More to the point, Media Services at its current incarnation has no way for you to do authorization of any kind, so the only tool you've got is time-bombed SAS locators.
The typical solution for this problem is to use DRM. Media Services supports PlayReady encryption, but you need to either have a PlayReady server or purchase it as a service (there is currently a service in the Azure Marketplace that provides PlayReady for a monthly price).
See following article how to protect assets with Microsoft PlayReady technology
Origin Locators are something you would use to publish a Smooth Stream or HLS asset. It is not useful for regular media files, as it is internally something equivalent to an IIS Media Services endpoint. For regular media files, you can just as well host them in Blob Storage -- and refer to them via the SAS locator.
There is currently no single format that will play across all devices and operating systems. You can get Smooth Streaming to work on most Windows and Mac computers (possibly Linux, too), either with Silverlight or with the Smooth Streaming Plugin for the Flash-based OSMF. For iOS devices you will need to encode to HLS and use the HTML5 video tag. Microsoft Media Platform will support MPEG-DASH, a recently ratified ISO/IEC standard for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP.More details how to use DASH preview feature can be found here
If you want smooth streaming for audio only, it looks like you will have to create a video asset with an empty video stream -- although there is a Uservoice request to add support for audio only in the future.
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 http streaming link which gives me .flv streaming feed. I want to convert that and access in my iPhone program. How can i do that? I want to have a desktop software like VLC and input this streaming feed URL and convert to iPhone supported and stream again to iPhone. I tried VLC with H.264 and Mpeg-1 audio, but seems to be it doesn't give the supported format, so as iPhone program doesn't play the video.
Could someone please guide me how can i setup a desktop software which can stream iPhone supported file?
Thanks in advance.
I think even the great VLC can't convert FLV on the fly...(or even do anything with FLV). As far as streaming goes, you'll probably be limited to the local network (Wi-Fi). I'd start with the simple way—create an ad-hoc file server on the desktop, then use AVPlayer's initWithURL method to find that video.
On the desktop, you could query the IP address of the computer, and ask the user to enter that URL (along with an optional port assignment and file component, like http://192.168.0.2:2234/streamingVideo.mp4) onto the iDevice, then convert to NSURL.
What exactly is the http streaming link? This matters a lot as in order to stream to the iPhone you need to use HTTP Live Streaming which requires some different bits than a typical flash media, or more properly RTMP, server. Typically you need two different streaming architectures or some expensive boxes.
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.