I am building this iphone app for a client and they have a large set of flash video files that they need to play/stream to the iphone. I understand that the iphone doesnt natively support flv playback but isnt there anything I can do to get around this problem?
In case it helps, they are using the akamai flash player on their website to play these video files.
Thanks in advance.
Yes! - You can convert all the videos to m4v format.
There's a javascript hack available, but it will only work if it's installed on the clients web server. It's also pretty clunky and slow and will likely murder battery life.
A workaround, since you're working with video, is to convert to mp4 format.
Short answer: no flash, but conversion will do what you need.
akamai actually supports "auto-packaging" of h.264 content which may be your best option here. By uploading 1 or more h.264 files you can use those to both serve your Flash player, and akamai will also auto-package them for iPhone (chunking them into .ts files and creating an .m3u8 reference file for dynamic mobile streaming).
This allows you to not have separate encodes for mobile and web, thus saving money and time so you can leverage your existing archive.
Related
I have an iOS app in which users upload a selfie video on my server. Afterwards, a reviewer sees the video on a back-office website, and accept/reject it.
The problem is that I upload MP4 video files from my iOS client app. When I load the file url in the <video> tag of my website, chrome doesn't load the video (no error is displayed in the console). In Safari, everything works fine.
After some researches, I saw that sometimes, mp4 video can't be played by Chrome. Strangly, I tried to play some other mp4 video found on my laptop in chrome, and it worked. As if there were several "kind" of MP4 encoding and the one my client apps uses to encode is not supported by Chrome.
I saw that Chrome could handle .webm format, but I takes a lot of time to my server (4 entiere minutes at 100% CPU...) to translate from a MP4 to a WEBM.
My questions are :
(1) Why some mp4 can be played by Chrome and other not ? How I can make Swift AVFoundation module encoding the recorded video in the "right" mp4 encoding ?
(2) If it's impossible, I'd like to encode the 2 files (webm and mp4) client-side, within the user devices (I really want to avoid handling these computations by my server as they look extremely long to perform). The problem is that Apple does not provide webm as a possible translatable format in the documentation : https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/avfiletype. Is there any way to translate a mp4 into a webm in Swift ?
(3) If (2) is impossible, is translating a user video into different formats server-side something commonly done as a "best practice" to manage video files and make them available in all platforms ? I mean, am I just missing some client-side trick to make mp4 videos playable everywhere or is it normal when dealing with cross platform videos to budget a whole CPU machine from AWS or whatever to handle conversions server-side ?
For whatever reason, Swift was encoding in a wrong encoding. To encode in the right encoding so it's available in a <video> tag in Chrome, I used, in my iOS app :
if movieFileOutput.availableVideoCodecTypes.contains(.h264) {
// Use the H.264 codec to encode the video.
movieFileOutput.setOutputSettings([AVVideoCodecKey: AVVideoCodecType.h264], for: connection!)
}
Does the HTML5 video player on the iPad Safari have the capability to play equivalent Flash content ?
Since the iPad does not have Flash support, is there any way by which the same content can be converted into an HTML5 format (something which can be played on the iPad) ? If yes, does HTML5 support creation of highly complex Flash like content ?
I see this as two questions:
Since the iPad does not have Flash support, is there any way by which the same content can be converted into an HTML5 format (something which can be played on the iPad) ?
By the same token that you can take a video and convert it to .flv format, you can (and will need to) convert the video to mp4/m4v/h.264 codec format. A tutorial for converting a video to h.264 with Handbrake is found here: http://www.simplewebtv.com/en_tutorials.html?doc=video_handbrake
Please note that your server may need to have the filetype identified to properly serve video. A quick description of adding Mime types to Apache is found here: http://bignosebird.com/apache/a1.shtml
If yes, does HTML5 support creation of highly complex Flash like content ?
Yes, you can do much of what can be done with Flash with HTML5. To see great examples of all the things currently being done with HTML5 (using mostly <Canvas>), see:
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/#canvas
http://aerotwist.com/lab/
http://www.canvasdemos.com/
This is a pretty good article on the topic as far as video is concerned: http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/video.html
If you are looking for a solution for interactive content have a look at http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/
Flash plays MP4 video files.
HTML5 video can also play MP4 video files (except on Firefox which requires WebM or Ogg).
So basically the answer is: Yes.
Making a native website iPhone app (converting a website to an iphone app) I want to stream this rtsp link: rtsp://67.85.223.199:110/cgi-bin/rtspStream/1 (there is no file extension I don't know why) if you enter that as a url on quick time it works. I can't embed it correctly for the iphone for it to work. I figure if I can stream it to a browser without active x it should be compatible for the iPhone. Tried a bunch of way to do this, hoping someone out there as the answer :)
-Mike
Judging by your URL, you are streaming with an IP camera. That can easily be restreamed to iPhone, Flash players, Android, anything, really. You may need to make sure your camera can stream H264 and AAC if you want audio. Our company is doing something similar with NetroMedia. http://www.netromedia.com/
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.
I need to convert image sequences(ie,png) to video file in iPhone. How i can convert the images to video.
Regards,
Just ignore bad advice like "use ffmpeg". That would work on the desktop, but the license issue makes including ffmpeg source code in your iPhone app legally questionable. Apple provides a class named AVAssetWriter that you would use in your app to encode a series of images as h.264 stored in a .m4v quicktime container file. While the apple provided logic does work, it is not so easy to actually use and you will need to read quite a lot of documentation to get the code working. If you want to skip implementing it yourself (and likely save yourself 3 or 4 days of work), please consider using my AVAnimator library for iOS as the h.264 encoding logic is already implemented in the class AVAssetWriterConvertFromMaxvid. Once encoded as h.264, the video can be played with the standard player and it is small enough to upload to a remote server.
You are likely going to need something like FFMPEG