I am trying to create a streaming video DVR like functionality in an app I am developing. I have an HTTP Live Stream that I have successfully gotten to play on the iPad. I want the user to be able to push the "Record" button, and begin recording the video that is currently playing from that point. This video file will be accessible from the app or from the camera roll. Currently, I am using the MPMoviePlayerController object to play the video stream. I do not see any methods of accessing the data from the object in Apple's documentation. Here are some thoughts I had on ways of going about this.
1) Somehow access the video data from MPMoviePlayerController, and write this to a file. Or use another type of player object that will allow me to play the video and access the currently playing data.
2) Implement some sort of screen capture recording that gets a video capture of the iPad's screen. This would allow me to record the video in a "screenshot" sort of way.
3) Locate the HTTP Live Streaming video segments where they are stored by MPMoviePlayerController. Presumably they need to be stored somewhere on the iPad for playback. Is there a way of accessing these files?
4) Manually download the stream video segments over http while streaming the file. This seems like its not ideal since the stream would have to be downloaded twice.
5) This could work. Periodically download the video segments to the iPhone. Set up a local http server on the iPhone and server the videos to the MPMoviePlayerController. This way the video segments could be marked for recording and assembled into a video.
6) I do have control of the streaming server. I could write some server side code to record the video on the server end, then send the video to the iPad after the fact. I would rather not do this.
Has anyone done any of these things? Ideally the iPhone would just be able to access the video data somehow and easily record it. I would rather not get into options 4, 5, or 6 (above) if I don't have to.
Thanks in advance.
DVR on the device is somewhat not encouraged, due to the limited space available and other factors like battery life, processing power, cleanup procedures after the user stops the dvr, etc.
If you want to achieve DVR playback on iOS devices (or other devices using HLS), I suggest you keep the video server side. The live stream is already captured and segmented server side, all you would have to do is keep the segments a bit longer, instead of deleting them. By using the EXT-X-PLAYLIST-TYPE and EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE tags, you can suggest to the player that he's opening a live stream which has DVR (earlier) video available.
Alternatively, you can use a server that does that out of the box, for example Wowza. Here's an article on how to achieve this with Wowza
Related
I want to play the video simultaneously while it is downloading via unitywebrequest. Will AVPro video support this? If so please provide me some guidance, as i am new to unity and avpro video. I can able to play the video which is downloaded fully through FullscreenVideo.prefab in AVPro demo. Any help will be much appreciated.
There are two main options you could use for displaying the video while it is still downloading.
Through livestream
You can stream a video to AVPro video using the "absolute path or URL" option on the media player component, then linking this to a stream in rtsp, MPEG-DASH, HLS, or HTTP progressive streaming format. Depending on what platforms you will be targeting some of these options will work better than others
A table of which file format supports what platform can be found in the AVProVideo Usermanual that is included with AVProVideo from page 12 and onwards.
If you want to use streaming you also need to set the "internet access" option to "required" in the player settings, as a video cannot stream without internet access.
A video that is being streamed will automatically start/resume playing when enough video is buffered.
This does however require a constant internet connection which may not be ideal if you're targeting mobile devices, or unnecessary if you're planning to play videos in a loop.
HLS m3u8
HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) works by cutting the overall stream into shorter, manageable hunks of data. These chunks will then get downloaded in sequence regardless of how long the stream is. m3u8 is a file format that works with playlists that keeps information on the location of multiple media files instead of an entire video, this can then be fed into a HLS player that will play the small media files in sequence as dictated in the m3u8 file.
using this method is usefull if you're planning to play smaller videos on repeat as the user will only have to download each chunk of the video once, which you can then store for later use.
You can also make these chunks of video as long or short as you want, and set a buffer of how many chunks you want to have pre-loaded. if for example you set the chunk size to 5 seconds, with a buffer of 5 videos the only loading time you'll have is when loading the first 25 seconds of the video. once these first 5 chunks are loaded it will start playing the video and load the rest of the chunks in the background, without interrupting the video (given your internet speed can handle it)
a con to this would be that you have to convert all your videos to m3u8 yourself. a tool such as FFMPEG can help with this though.
references
HLS
m3u8
AVPro documentation
I'm looking for a way to create an app that will allow captured camera video to be streamed on a computer. For example, one person could be walking an iPhone around a room and another person could have that video streamed on their computer. Something kind of like a one-way Facetime except the receiver is on a computer. Also, I can't just use an existing app as later I would like to change the program to do some computer vision processing on the incoming data.
At the moment, I've found that AV Foundation should be the correct option for the video capture (from this question). However, I'm having difficulty finding the method by which I can actually stream this data. In particular, searching for how to create the apps on the iPhone frequently results in existing apps that do the task, but not how to create the app.
Can anyone give me a pointer to the information on how to stream the video capture from the iPhone? Thank you much.
You can use "Wowza media Server" for Streaming purpose
For wowza media server doenload :
Wowza Download
After installing wowza Now you need to set up live setting in wowza for that purpose you need:
Setting Up Live Application
For iOS side there is library is useful for video streaming using RTMP connection
You can get Library at
RTMP library for Streaming
Library example
RTMP library for Streaming example
In this good example of Streaming from iOS side
I had success with ANGL lib and Wowza media server. It gives smooths RTMP stream.
I am streaming video(H264) across network on iOS.I am getting the data in buffers.Is there any way to play this streamed video on iOS? I cannot use AVPlayer or MPMoviePlayerController as these need the URL.
Why not just create a local "web server" and hand AVPlayer the URL to that? It's probably under 100 lines of code and pretty trivial to do with Apple's built-in classes. You'd then just hand out your buffers via the web server.
What technology is used for live streaming of video from iPhone cam to a distant server.
I want to show live streaming as well as save the video, once it gets finished.
The way its being done right now is by capturing the frames as the movie is taken (right now its being done through a screenshot private api, but now with 4.0 u can grab the frame of videos a better way, cant discuss that right now tho), then take some number of frames, encode them using ffmpeg or some ohter encoding library, send the video chunks to your server and live stream them using the live http streaming...thats a birdeye view of how its being done..hope it helps
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.