I am attempting to make my app, this is an app that will integrate live streaming that could be accessed by anyone that is signed up. I have been searching and the information is very vague.
What factors do I have to take into consideration to make an IOS app with live streaming?
I would have no clue how to implement any of this and I haven't seen much documentation about how to implement this. What third party software would I have to use, would I need to create something in a different programming language?
This app is going to be only for IOS for now.
Thanks,
The question is, how many users? How much do you want to spend? How critical is performance/quality/downtime, etc.? Is this a business app?
Due to having multiple users connect to one stream, I would suggest that the streamer streams it to a server, whereby the server deals with the bandwidth requirements to clients, allowing for it to more easily scale. If it is a one-on-one or up to maybe one on three, you could still think of p2p for a social stream (e.g. streaming to family) but not e.g. a business conference (unless you want them to have e2e encryption, avoiding server, etc. which is usually complete overkill, though do implement encryption if possible, quite easy using libraries).
Now if you're asking coding wise, look for some tutorials, e.g. https://www.raywenderlich.com/5191-video-streaming-tutorial-for-ios-getting-started is quite nice, it's quite straight forward and will probably do what you want for the client accessing it. Use the AVFoundation Playback https://developer.apple.com/av-foundation/ it has links to HTTP live streaming and how to implement it as well.
Related
I am a developer who is still learning . I want to design an app which can allow multiple people to have a video conference/chats simultaneously something like zoom . I know i can design native apps like specific for Android as well as iOS but I am still learning Android development and have no idea about iOS code .I searched and found that we can have hybrid apps having React,Node.js or with Angular.js and they work on different platforms .But as I'm a newbie I need suggestions as well as guidance .what I'm expecting in my app are following things :
Should support all video resolutions and audio quality, should
work in low and high network scenarios
Should be low on usage of power/ processor
Should not have any external hardware dependency
Should work on any device
Should have chat option during conference, even the multi
people conference
Should have sign-in and non-sign-in options to join a
conference
Can be browser and/or app based interface
Should have encrypted network communication
Should have audio/ video recording feature
Should have screen/file sharing capabilities
Should allow audio to close captioning during chat
(multilingual)
Should have capabilities to host multiple concurrent
conferences having multiple participants in each conference
I know its a tedious task to involve everything I discussed but I need guidance how to do this .
I have already told my expectation so now I want to know what steps I need to do so ,How to start as well as where to start ,what language/library I should choose ,whether having a hybrid app be a good idea or should I go for native apps .As I have earlier said I am a learner so I am going to learn each and everything to get my project done ,so whether its react or node or angular or whatever experienced developer are going to suggest/guide here .I know my question may look broad or even vague but still I am asking only because I see stack-overflow as a group of supportive accomplished coders .Hope you guys will help me in getting my project done .Thank you !
OK then you have got much work to do. I will point you to some references which should give you a good start. I will try to keep this as short as possible.
As you mentioned, WebRTC is the way to go.
With WebRTC, you can add real-time communication capabilities to your
application that works on top of an open standard. It supports video,
voice, and generic data to be sent between peers, allowing developers
to build powerful voice- and video communication solutions. The
technology is available on all modern browsers as well as on native
clients for all major platforms.
This blog explains how WebRTC functions in details - https://medium.com/#anto.christo.20/understanding-web-real-time-communication-webrtc-d4cec5a43f2f
This blog explains how to build peer2peer video calling in android -
https://medium.com/#anto.christo.20/understanding-web-real-time-communication-webrtc-d4cec5a43f2f
https://webrtc.org/ also contains lot of headstart material including sample code.
Once you have done this you can add other features on top of it.
Now, this will take care of peer2peer but if you want o build a multi-user functionality from scratch there is some extra work required as mentioned in the answer - how to build multi-user video chatting web app using webRTC, node.js and socket.io
As a final school-graduation project I try to develop a kind of spying-car. Which means there is an iPhone placed on a little LEGO-car and an iPad used as a "steering wheel" for the car. Also it is planned to transmit Audio and Video from the iPhone's microphone/camera to the iPad (more than the steering data vice versa).
In the first place the connection from iOS to iOS should be established over a local WiFi network and later - if possible - over 3G (by using the iOS devices network-IP and a DNS server to deal with frequently changing addresses).
My question is: which technology do you recommend using? I read about GameKit, peer-to-peer and so on, but I think these technologies are too abstract for later being able to communicate over 3G. I guess I need to go a little deeper into the low levels of the communication progress. Any suggestion that could bring me a step forward is highly appreciated! (also regarding other parts of my project)
One more thing: Some user suggested using a third party service and to route the sent (video) data over an external server. If possible, I'd rather not use any "middle man". It should just be a basic server-client communication where the iPad is the server and the iPhone the client.
It is kind of an open ended question, but interesting.
First of all, GameKit do have 3g p2p support, see here:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/GameKit_Guide/Matchmaking/Matchmaking.html
It will handle the peer-to-peer addressing and establisment of the socket. It can also handle voice chat, but I personally never tried this feature so I can't say if it is feasible in your case.
One idea is to leverage existing video-chat services. This will give you a low-latency audio/video channel with peer-to-peer addressing (well, likely using a central server).
Apple's FaceTime is such a service, but there is no public API to it (AFAIK). Same goes for Skype and Google.
There are some paid services that look like they have nice iOS APIs:
http://tokbox.com/platform
http://docs.weemo.com/sdk/ios/
You have to figure out a way to transmit control commands to the peer iPhone, I did not see if the services above had any possibility of sending text messages/arbitrary data.
Tokbox has a free trial so you could try it out and see if it works for you.
I would go for GameKit if this is a hobby project on a budget and there is time for hacking, and probably look into a more high-level API if there is a deadline...
sorry for writing this as an answer, but i don't have enough rep to comment...
i'm working on a similar project and i currently don't have any advice regrading video-streaming, however, from what i read (extensively) i came to the conclusion that i need to use p2p connection between devices for better performance and use socket programming in order to achieve this (although not the most easy to implement choice).
I considered using GameKit which i think will probably answer most of your needs as Krumelur pointed out. but in my case, eventually the app will be cross platform so i had to use low level network programming. you can check out my question here to see the sources i used to try and make the connection between 2 peers, hopefully you'll have better luck than me...
For developing a video content heavy website like youtube which language/framework might be a better option from performance and support for video conversion/compression plugins point of view. Some points worth considering may be.
CPU vs I/O time
Support for compression/conversion plugin (existing mods/gems/libs)
Ease of learning is not very important though inputs are welcome
I know the question sounds a bit subjective however my intention is to understand the technicalities involved from someone who has had experience developing similar kind of site(s).
Unfortunately there isn't one or two APIs/Libraries/Frameworks you can knit together to produce a video serving website.
Invariably this will require heavy involvement on all levels of the stack:
Server back-end will require the following problems to be solved:
Video Encoding
FFMPEG or MPlayer experience for encoding any number of video formats to either FLV or more recent h264 for HTML5 supported formats
A reliable mechanism to transcode video in a background process; initially on one server but eventually on multiple servers as your services scales
Video resizing
Bandwidth Management to throttle connection just enough so that the video trickles down to the user
Storing video files and a file sharding and naming mechanism
API Server - Something like Rails, Django or NodeJS Express to serve as a JSON service layer between web clients and the video encoding/serving service.
Front end will require the following issues to be solved:
Playing back the video reliably across multiple OSes (Windows, OSX, Linux, Tablets, Mobile) and Platforms (IE, Chrome/Safari, Firefox, Opera) with fallback support for older browsers
DRM - are your videos free or commercial? If the latter, this is another issue that needs to be addressed
I'd strongly recommend an Event Driven system on your back-end as it is much easier to develop code that supports concurrency. NodeJS would be a good pick. It is worth looking at node-fluent-ffmpeg module for NodeJS as a good starting point.
As for your front-end I'd recommend frameworks such as Backbone.js or AngularJS to develop you web-app.
It was a fun and challenging journey when I attempted something similar a few years ago. I wish you good fortune in your journey.
For a site like that, I guess will need to choose several tools to do the job.
For the web, you could use any framework, so rails would be OK, to deal with videos you'll need something like ffmpeg or transconding to convert the videos.
For streaming, if you can use HTML5 check this question otherwise you'll need a player whith flash fallback.
Remember that the heavy part in terms of storage and CPU is video compressing/conversion.
All,
Apologies in advance - this question might be too open-ended for SO.
Anyway... A friend of mine (an engineer and entrepreneur) is in the process of building a high-tech piece of lab equipment. He's asked me about the feasibility of building an iPhone/iPad/iPod application that would allow users to control the device via Bluetooth, so I'm helping him gather some information. I'm hoping to get a few pointers on how to get started. Specifically:
Would this require a native app, or could this be accomplished with HTML5 (with or without something like PhoneGap?)
Can you point me to a good primer on bluetooth networking? Everything I've found assumed a VERY high level of pre-existing knowledge.
What are the basics on how something like this is accomplished? Is there a single, established protocol for how one device "controls" another, or is bluetooth more like SSL - just a pipe that allows you to convey any type of message?
I realize this question is incredibly broad and detailed - so I'm not really looking for specifics. But obvious Google searches don't turn up much, and I'm otherwise having a hard time finding a good starting point.
Thanks in advance.
You can communicate via bluetooth in two ways: One is using the Low Energy Bluetooth capabilities of iOS 5 and newer iPhone/ipads.
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/CoreBluetooth/Reference/CoreBluetooth_Framework/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40011295
Unfortunately the documentation is sparse and will require some hacking away. If you choose this route I would consider starting here and learning as much as you can about how the protocols work before hacking into the framework:
http://developer.bluetooth.org/gatt/services/Pages/ServicesHome.aspx
The limitations of this route are that it might not be best for sending a lot of data. I have only built stuff that sent simple commands which it does work great for.
The other option is the external accessory framework. This will require you to get an mfi license from apple (not fun). You will also need to pay royalties. But it will do what you want. You won't need to concern yourself much with underlying protocols if you use this, the framework provides a friendly api for processing streams.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/ExternalAccessory/Reference/ExternalAccessoryFrameworkReference/_index.html
I've been scouring the SO board and google and can't find any really good recommendations for this. I'm building a Twilio application and the text-to-speech (TTS) engine is way bad. Plus, it's a pain in the ass to test since I have to deploy every time. Is there a significantly better resource out there that could render to a WAV or MP3 file so I can save and use that instead? Maybe there's a great API for this somewhere. I just want to avoid recording 200 MP3 files myself, would rather have this generated programatically...
Things I've seen and rejected:
http://www.yakitome.com/ (I couldn't force myself to give them my email)
http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm
http://www.panopreter.com/index.php (on the basis of crappy website)
Thinking of paying for this, but not sure yet: https://ondemand.neospeech.com/
Obviously I'm new to this, if I'm missing something obvious, please point it out...
I am not sure if you have access to a mac computer or not. Mac has pretty advanced tts built into the operating system. Apple spent a lot of money on top engineers to research it. It can easily be controlled and even automated from the command prompt. It also has quite a few built in voices to choose from. That is what I used on a recent phone system I put up. But I realize that this is not an option if you don't have a mac.
Another one you might want to check into is http://cepstral.com/ they have very realistic voices. I think they used to be open source but they are no longer and now you need to pay licensing fees. They are very commonly used for high end commercial applications. And are not so much geared towards the home user that wants their article read to them.
I like the YAKiToMe! website the best. It's free and the voices are top quality. In case you're still worried about giving them your email, they've never spammed me in many years of use and I never got onto any spam lists after signing up with them, so I doubt they sold my email. Anyway, the service is great and has lots of features for turning electronic text into audio files in different languages.
As for the API you're looking for, YAKiToMe! has a well-documented API and it's free to use. You have to register with the site to use it, but that's because it lets you customize pronunciation and voice selection, so it needs to differentiate you from other users.