I'm currently trying to create an app which makes use of the ReplayKit Live feature to broadcast the iPhone screen to a service which I want to provide by myself (basically something similar to what Teamviewer QuickSupport is doing).
I do know how to create the extension by itself, however, I do not have enough information on how the best way would be to process these informations and upload it to the backend. I did search a lot but without any success:
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/52434 - This is basically the same question I have but sadly without any answer
So my question is: Does anyone have any insight on how the video sample buffer (made available by processSampleBuffer) could be processed and uploaded on a backend without inducing large delays?
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Is there any way, using currently available SDK frameworks on Cocoa (touch) to create a streaming solution where I would host my mp4 content on some server and stream it to my iOS client app?
I know how to write such a client, but it's a bit confusing on server side.
AFAIK cloudKit is not suitable for that task because behind the scenes it keeps a synced local copy of datastore which is NOT what I want. I want to store media content remotely and stream it to the client so that it does not takes precious space on a poor 16 GB iPad mini.
Can I accomplish that server solution using Objective-C / Cocoa Touch at all?
Should I instead resort to Azure and C#?
It's not 100% clear why would you do anything like that?
If you have control over the server side, why don't you just set up a basic HTTP server, and on client side use AVPlayer to fetch the mp4 and play it back to the user? It is very simple. A basic apache setup would do the job.
If it is live media content you want to stream, then it is worth to read this guide as well:
https://developer.apple.com/Library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StreamingMediaGuide/StreamingMediaGuide.pdf
Edited after your comment:
If you would like to use AVPlayer as a player, then I think those two things don't fit that well. AVPlayer needs to buffer different ranges ahead (for some container formats the second/third request is reading the end of the stream). As far as I can see CKFetchRecordsOperation (which you would use to fetch the content from the server) is not capable of seeking in the stream.
If you have your private player which doesn't require seeking, then you might be able to use CKFetchRecordsOperation's perRecordProgressBlock to feed your player with data.
Yes, you could do that with CloudKit. First, it is not true that CloudKit keeps a local copy of the data. It is up to you what you do with the downloaded data. There isn't even any caching in CloudKit.
To do what you want to do, assuming the content is shared between users, you could upload it to CloudKit in the public database of your app. I think you could do this with the CloudKit web interface, but otherwise you could create a simple Mac app to manage the uploads.
The client app could then download the files. It couldn't stream them though, as far as I know. It would have to download all the files.
If you want a streaming solution, you would probably have to figure out how to split the files into small chunks, and recombine them on the client app.
I'm not sure whether this document is up-to-date, but there is paragraph "Requirements for Apps" which demands using HTTP Live Streaming if you deliver any video exceeding 10min. or 5MB.
I have an iOS app that uses a lot of pictures and videos. Currently, I use parse.com as backend and I store the pictures in parse.com database. Imagine I have 200 tasks, each task with two pictures and one video. Now, each user will have his own set of tasks, for example, user A may have 20 tasks, user B 40 and user C 50, all different tasks included on those 200.
Now, I'm worried about app performance, not so much server storage and other structure details...
I don't think including all pictures in the app bundle is a good idea, because user will use only about 40% of the pictures at a time, so it wouldn't be wise to include it all in the app. Instead, I have the pictures in database and when user needs, the app makes a request and gets it. Am I right about this? Is this the best performance?
Regarding the videos, should I store the videos in youTube.com or in my parse.com database? I think youTube is the best option because I can live stream the video whether in parse.com I will need to download the video first. Does that make sense?
If there are any other services or better way to handle pictures and videos in an iOS app, please let me know.
Regarding images - the best performance here is to store them remotely on a server and from what it seems, you're doing it right.
Storing videos on YouTube is not the best idea but definitely better then just storing them on your server - if you have the ability to upload multiple Youtube videos from lots of users and if Google API allows that - I'd go for this option.
In general I would store as little as possible on the device, apart from the image cache maybe. Nevertheless even the image cache sometimes grows to hundreds of MBs so you have to think about it as well.
I have a question, my app is a short video share application just like vine, but now I encounter questions when used in subway or some places with weak signals, it will fail sometimes and have poor user experience.
I am a newbie for network programming and iOS. I did a lot search on Google, and have some general sense, let me sum up my finds and pls help to give some suggestions for it.
My requirement is：1. support resume when uploading interrupt. 2. can success upload in weak signal. Actually I do NOT need to think about the realtime problems or how to compress the video, just think the video as a file is totally ok. BTW the server is a REST style, I use post to upload datas.
Questions:
which is the better way for my requirement, using stream(stream NOT mean live stream video just data stream like NSOutStream&NSInputStream, just play the video after all of it has uploaded, NOT the live stream video playing and downloading at meantime) or divide the whole file into several chunks and upload chunk by chunk.
someone said, using stream is good for resource efficiency since the stream will read files into memory and control the size of the buffer and after setup connection with server we use delegate to control the failure so easy to use.
Upload chunk by chunk is good at speed, I have puzzled with this statement, upload by chunks after successfully upload one chunk we need to release the connection resources and setup another connection then do upload I think this will spend time to do these preparation stuffs.
If upload by chunks which size should be good, one video file is almost 1M bytes, someone said 8k is a safe choice, but......
since the app needs to adapt to different signal strength, is there any way? for example the chunk size is depended on the bandwidth or other ways
Is there any private API already support resume uploading interrupt or is there any apple api can support this, my app needs to run on iOS 5 and above so can NOT use NSURLSession
Concurrent uploading is a way to speed up? If so how to implement or any API available?
Thank you in advance for helping a newbie like me. Thank you very much.
It takes o lot of topics your question. iOS doesn't have an public API to stream video (such as the face time components). The main issue here is sending frame by frame will require a lot of network traffic, instead if you use the normal video writer you get hardware compression, that will be a lot better. There's more and you can check here: Realtime Audio/Video Streaming FROM iPhone to another device (Browser, or iPhone), Upload live streaming video from iPhone like Ustream or Qik, How send to stream video from iOS device to server? and here
If real time is not your problem I would suggest you just to use a good network manager such as: MKNetworkkit or AFNetworking 2.0 . They will take care of most of the aspect that you asked.
It is possible to implement a feature that allows users to watch videos as they are uploaded to server by others. Is html 5 suitable for this task? But flash? Are there any read to go solutions, don't want to reinvent the wheel. The application will be hosted on a dedicated server.
Thanks.
Of course it is possible, the data is there isnt it?
However it will be very hard to implement.
Also I am not so into python and I am not aware of a library or service suiting your requirements, but I can cover the basics of video streaming.
I assume you are talking about video files that are uploaded and not streams. Because, for that, there are obviously thousands of solutions out there...
In the most simple case the video being uploaded is already ready to be served to your clients and has a so called "faststart atom". They are container format specific and there are sometimes a bunch of them. The most common is the moov-atom. It contains a lot of data and is very complex, however in our use case, in a nutshell, it holds the data that enables the client to begin playing the video right away using the data available from the beginning.
You need that if you have progressive download videos (youtube...), meaning where a file is served from a Webserver. You obviously have not downloaded the full file and the player already can start playing.
If the fastastart atom was not present, that would not be possible.
Sometimes it is, but the player for example cannot display a progress bar, because it doesnt know how long the file is.
Having that covered the file could be uploaded. You will need an upload solution that writes the data directly to a buffer or a file. (file will be easier...).
This is almost always the case, for example PHP creates a file in the tmp_dir. You can also specify it if you want to find the video while its being uploaded.
Well, now you can start reading that file byte by byte and print that data to a connection to another client. Just be sure not to go ahead of what has already been recieved and written. You would probaby initiate your upload with a metadata set in memory that holds the current recieved byte position and location of the file.
Anyone who requests the file after the uploaded has started can just recieve the entire file, or if the upload is not yet finished, get it from your application.
You will have to throttle the data delivery or pause it when the data becomes short. This will appear to the client almost as a "slow connection". However you will have to echo some data from time to time to prevent the connection from closing. But if your upload doesnt stall, and why shoud it?, that shouldnt be a problem.
Now if you want to have someting like on the fly transcoding of various input formats into your desired output format, things get interesting.
AFAIK ffmpeg has neat apis which lets you directly deal with datasterams.
Also handbrake is a very good tool, however you would need to take the long road using external executeables.
I am not really aware of your requirements, however if your clients are already tuned in, for example on a red 5 streaming server, feeding data into a stream should also work fine.
Yes, take a look at Qik, http://qik.com/
"Instant Video Sharing ... Videos can be viewed live (right as they are being recorded) or anytime later."
Qik provides developer APIs, including ones like these:
qik.stream.subscribe_public_recent -- Subscribe to the videos (live and recorded)
qik.user.following -- Provides the list of people the user is following
qik.stream.public_info -- Get public information for a specific video
It is most certainly to do this, but it won't be trivial. And no, I don't think that you will find an "out of the box" solution that will require little effort on your behalf.
You say you want to let:
users watch videos as they are uploaded to server by others
Well, this could be interpreted two different ways:
Do you mean that you don't want a user to have to refresh the page before seeing new videos that other users have just finished uploading?
Or do you mean that you want one user to be able to watch a partially uploaded video (aka another user is still in the process of uploading it and right now the server only contains a partial upload of the video)?
Implementing #1 wouldn't be hard at all whatsoever. You would just need an AJAX script to check for newly uploaded videos, and those videos could then be served to the user in whatever way you choose. HTML5 vs. Flash isn't really a consideration here.
The second scenario, on the other hand, would require quite a bit of effort. I am guessing that HTML5 might not be mature enough to handle this type of situation. If you are not looking
to reinvent the wheel and don't have a lot of time to dedicate to this feature than I would say that you would be out of luck. You may be able to use ffmpeg to parse partial video files and feed them to a Flash player, but I would think of this as a large task.
I’m working on a small iPhone app which is streaming movie content over a network connection using regular sockets. The video is in H.264 format. I’m however having difficulties with playing/decoding the data. I’ve been considering using FFMPEG, but the license makes it unsuitable for the project. I’ve been looking into Apple’s AVFoundation framework (AVPlayer in particular), which seems to be able to handle h264 content, however I’m only able to find methods to initiate the movie using an url – not by proving a memory buffer streamed from the network.
I’ve been doing some tests to make this happen anyway, using the following approaches:
Play the movie using a regular AVPlayer. Every time data is received on the network, it’s written to a file using fopen with append-mode. The AVPlayer’s asset is then reloaded/recreated with the updated data. There seems to be two issues with this approach: firstly, the screen goes black for a short moment while the first asset is unloaded and the new loaded. Secondly, I do not know exactly where the playing stopped, so I’m unsure how I would find out the right place to start playing the new asset from.
The second approach is to write the data to the file as in the first approach, but with the difference that the data is loaded into a second asset. A AVQueuedPlayer is then used where the second asset is inserted/queued in the player and then called when the buffering has been done. The first asset can then be unloaded without a black screen. However, using this approach it’s even more troublesome (than the first approach) to find out where to start playing the new asset.
Has anyone done something like this and made it work? Is there a proper way of doing this using AVFoundation?
The official method to do this is the HTTP Live Streaming format which supports multiple quality levels (among other things) and automatically switches between them (eg: if the user moves from WiFi to cellular).
You can find the docs here: Apple Http Streaming Docs