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?
Related
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
I am in need for some help as I am stuck with a problem with my current IPhone application. I won't go into every details but the mainline is as follow:
I am currently playing videos from a remote URL. Everthing up to this point is working. But we need to add a certain validation as if the video exists on the local IPhone, play this version and otherwise, get the remote version. I get these informations from an XML feed and have the name of the video and it's remote URL.
I've implemented the ALAssetLibrary as a way to retrieve the locals video and transfered 3-4 videos with custom names. After some struggling, I could play these local video. But while I loop through them, all I get is names like 00001.jpg, etc.
Is there any way to get a local video name ? I don't mind if this needs another library but I would appreciate if someone could point me a way of doing it.
Thanks for your time,
AP
You don't have access to the local filenames, and even if you did those filenames would probably not be what you are expecting (i.e. Apple can and probably does rename them while saving them to the Camera Roll).
You can check the metadata on the ALAssetRepresentation for the video to see if a suitable name or other identifier can be found in there. You might also be able to retrieve the raw data and hash it, but that would fail if Apple does any recoding or metadata alteration when saving the video. If your program itself downloads and saves the videos to the Camera Roll using writeVideoAtPathToSavedPhotosAlbum:completionBlock:, you could store the returned assetURL to remember the correspondence. Or you could save the videos to your app's local storage instead of to the Camera Roll, but that would prevent the user from managing the videos with Apple's photo application and such.
Situation
I'm using NSURLConnection to download an mp3 file to the documents directory on my app. On the simulator I get the full mp3 file downloaded with no probs. On the device, however, I can only seem to get 1 second of audio for each mp3. I am connecting to a free WiFi point when performing this download from the device, in contrast with my T1 land-line connection that is used by the simulator.
Problem
Users of my app may encounter only partial downloads of mp3 files.
Question
Does this sound like a problem with the free WiFi hotspot rather than the actual app or NSURLConnection class? How should I go about troubleshooting this?
P.S. - I used to use [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:URL] to download the mp3 file. It was very slow but at least I always got the ENTIRE mp3 file.
Thanks
Are you handling multiple callbacks of -connection: didReceiveData:? That will get called multiple times, and you should concatenate each data chunk into one giant NSMutableData.
After launching a video using MPMoviePlayerController's initWithContentURL:, is it possible to cache the downloaded video so that the next time the video is played it can be loaded via a local file:// URI? I understand that it's possible to do my own downloading and then launch the movie player, however I would like to take advantage of the player's ability to start prior to completion of preload.
one trick, is to start the download to disk - (using atomic : YES), wait 10 seconds, and point the movie player to the local disk path. it will "download" while playing the incomplete file.
next time, just check if the file exists first.
I got this working pretty well on WIFI connections, but on 3G there were all kinds of crashyness.
worse, there were issues with incomplete local files. let me know if it is worth it.
I haven't tested this, but it may be possible to override [NSURLCache sharedURLCache] with a custom disk-only cache implementation. If MPMoviePlayerController uses NSURLRequest, it could work.
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.