I want to be able to (live) stream the frames/video FROM the iPhone camera to the internet. I've seen in a Thread (streaming video FROM an iPhone) that it's possible using AVCaptureSession's beginConfiguration and commitConfiguration. But I don't know how to start designing this task. There are already a lot of tutorials about how to stream video TO the iPhone, and it is not actually what I am searching for.
Could you guys give me any ideas which could help me further?
That's a tricky one. You should be able to do it, but it won't be easy.
One way that wouldn't be live (not answering your need, but worth mentioning) is to capture from the camera and save it to a video file. see the AV Foundation Guide on how to do that. Once saved you can then use the HTTP Live Streaming segmenter to generate the proper segments. Apple has applications for Mac OSX, but there's an open source version as well that you could adapt for iOS. On top of that, you'd also have to run an http server to serve those segments. Lots of http servers out there you could adapt.
But to do it live, first as you have already found, you need to collect frames from the camera. Once you have those you want to convert them to h.264. For that you want ffmpeg. Basically you shove the images to ffmpeg's AVPicture, making a stream. Then you'd need to manage that stream so that the live streaming segmenter recognized it as a live streaming h.264 device. I'm not sure how to do that, and it sounds like some serious work. Once you've done that, then you need to have an http server, serving that stream.
What might actually be easier would be to use an RTP/RTSP based stream instead. That approach is covered by open source versions of RTP and ffmpeg supports that fully. It's not http live streaming, but it will work well enough.
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.
So generally, I want to make an app which has video chat functionality for iPhone. But after many searches, I am still not able to find any successful results. Is there any public or even for that matter, private API available for doing this on iPhone??? If you have an YES answer, please help me.
Basically, what I want is to read the streams of the video on both the devices connected for chatting. Thanks a lot in advance and please help me if you can.
p.s - I have already checked iDoubs but it failed and always shows some unknown problem and for that reason, doesn't allow me to connect to anyone.
ALSO : The suggested method I have found is via HTTP Live Streaming. But, in that too, I have multiple doubts.
1.) I need to find how do I upload my video from iPhone to the HTTP server from where I would be broadcasting?
2.) Can you please post something related to setting up the server? How do I feed the video to the FFMPEG Server?
Mainly, I need to find the upload method. I am right now simply sending hex-code in the form of NSDATA to the server and I am stuck there. The main problem is, It is live. How do I handle that?
It would be best, if you could help me make the iDoubs work properly.
Thank you so much for any kind of support!
have a look on this how to implement video chat in iphone But before starting you must have a IMS server up & running.
here is the live video chat framework what you are looking for. Its easy and simple to implement for face to face video chat. I have already tried this. Its working very fine. Great thing about this framework is multiple platform support.
Tokbox : https://tokbox.com/platform
https://tokbox.com/opentok/tutorials/
Sample Code:
https://github.com/opentok/opentok-ios-sdk-samples/
Edit:
Here is the article explaining opentok using parse.
http://www.iphonegamezone.net/ios-tutorial-create-iphone-video-chat-app-using-parse-and-opentok-tokbox/
HTTP live streaming is primarily an approach for adaptive streaming from server-to-client. For client-to-server rather go for traditional streaming. There exists an open library for streaming, see this question.
Whilst it is possible to facetime to do two-way chat, it is not certain that you will be able to using public iOS APIs. That said, I have implemented one-way live streaming for iPhone and the difficult part was not the core streaming itself, but encoding of the payload. You will be able to do H264 in hardware and AAC / iLBC in software.
How you want to feed this to the FFMPEG depends on your transport, possibly changing from 'file' H264 frames to 'streaming' H264. Check out the H264 frame types if you implement frame dropping; reconfiguring the H264 encoder on-the-fly is not possible to my knowledge, but restarting with fresh parameters typically does not take more than a second or so.
Did you attempt to play back a live resource while capturing? That is a good starting point. If you come across an open API for H264 encoding, please post it here ;-)
I'd like to get real-time video from the iPhone to another device (either desktop browser or another iPhone, e.g. point-to-point).
NOTE: It's not one-to-many, just one-to-one at the moment. Audio can be part of stream or via telephone call on iphone.
There are four ways I can think of...
Capture frames on iPhone, send
frames to mediaserver, have
mediaserver publish realtime video
using host webserver.
Capture frames on iPhone, convert to
images, send to httpserver, have
javascript/AJAX in browser reload
images from server as fast as
possible.
Run httpServer on iPhone, Capture 1 second duration movies on
iPhone, create M3U8 files on iPhone, have the other
user connect directly to httpServer on iPhone for
liveStreaming.
Capture 1 second duration movies on
iPhone, create M3U8 files on iPhone,
send to httpServer, have the other
user connected to the httpServer
for liveStreaming. This is a good answer, has anyone gotten it to work?
Is there a better, more efficient option?
What's the fastest way to get data off the iPhone? Is it ASIHTTPRequest?
Thanks, everyone.
Sending raw frames or individual images will never work well enough for you (because of the amount of data and number of frames). Nor can you reasonably serve anything from the phone (WWAN networks have all sorts of firewalls). You'll need to encode the video, and stream it to a server, most likely over a standard streaming format (RTSP, RTMP). There is an H.264 encoder chip on the iPhone >= 3GS. The problem is that it is not stream oriented. That is, it outputs the metadata required to parse the video last. This leaves you with a few options.
Get the raw data and use FFmpeg to encode on the phone (will use a ton of CPU and battery).
Write your own parser for the H.264/AAC output (very hard)
Record and process in chunks (will add latency equal to the length of the chunks, and drop around 1/4 second of video between each chunk as you start and stop the sessions).
"Record and process in chunks (will add latency equal to the length of the chunks, and drop around 1/4 second of video between each chunk as you start and stop the sessions)."
I have just wrote such a code, but it is quite possible to eliminate such a gap by overlapping two AVAssetWriters. Since it uses the hardware encoder, I strongly recommend this approach.
We have similar needs; to be more specific, we want to implement streaming video & audio between an iOS device and a web UI. The goal is to enable high-quality video discussions between participants using these platforms. We did some research on how to implement this:
We decided to use OpenTok and managed to pretty quickly implement a proof-of-concept style video chat between an iPad and a website using the OpenTok getting started guide. There's also a PhoneGap plugin for OpenTok, which is handy for us as we are not doing native iOS.
Liblinphone also seemed to be a potential solution, but we didn't investigate further.
iDoubs also came up, but again, we felt OpenTok was the most promising one for our needs and thus didn't look at iDoubs in more detail.
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.
Using FFMPEG, Live555, JSON
Not sure how it works but if you look at the source files at http://github.com/dropcam/dropcam_for_iphone you can see that they are using a combination of open source projects like FFMPEG, Live555, JSON etc. Using Wireshark to sniff the packets sent from one of the public cameras that's available to view with the free "Dropcam For Iphone App" at the App Store, I was able to confirm that the iphone was receiving H264 video via RTP/RTSP/RTCP and even RTMPT which looks like maybe some of the stream is tunneled?
Maybe someone could take a look at the open source files and explain how they got RTSP to work on the iphone.
Thanks for the info TinC0ils. After digging a little deeper I'v read that they have modified the Axis camera with custom firmware to limit the streaming to just a single 320x240 H264 feed, to better provide a consistent quality video over different networks and, as you point out, be less of a draw on the phone's hardware etc. My interest was driven by a desire to use my iphone to view live video and audio from a couple of IP cameras that I own without the jerkiness of MJPEG or the inherent latency that is involved with "http live streaming". I think Dropcam have done an excellent job with their hardware/software combo, I just don't need any new hardware at the moment.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot the reason of this post RTSP PROTOCOL DOES WORK ON THE IPHONE!
They are using open source projects to receive the frames and decoding in software instead of using hardware decoders. This will work, however, this runs counter to Apple's requirement that you use their HTTP Streaming. It will also require greater CPU resources such that it doesn't decode video at the desired fps/resolution on older devices and/or decrease battery life compared to HTTP streaming.