Everyone knows about there instructional videos http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Delphi_Videos but I want to watch them on my iPad when I go on vacation.
The problem is the videos are in swf and will not play on my iPad. Does any know of another source for these videos in another format?
Thanks.
For the moment flash video is the container of choice for most video content on the internet. Saif is right. If you want those specific videos you'll need to convert them yourself. There are several decent flv to mp4 converters available for free (Miro comes to mind). SWF is takes a bit more work to extract the video content.
Now if you are looking for Delphi content that's already available in MPEG 4 you can try http://edn.embarcadero.com/tv. The content from the most recent Coderage event is available as an mp4 download.
You can convert them into a proper format using a free video convert like Any Video Converter
I've had reasonable success watching on-line Flash content on my iPad using iOSFlashVideo.
Not tried it on off-line flash files though.
--jeroen
Related
I'm using VLC to playback my H.265 videos
Using Cyberlink PowerDirector to re-encode videos to H.265 from original H.264, saves a bunch of space and i'm the only one viewing the content so not an issue for media platforms.
Currently when running the re-encode the video will come out as expected, except the subtitles no longer exist. This software does have the ability to attach subs via SRT or what have you but I need to first extract the existing subs into a text file as the program doesn't allow that (to my knowledge), VLC apparently does?
PowerDirector does indeed have a built in function to extract subtitles from a video which can be accessed via the timeline when right clicking the video and selecting "Extract Subtitles/English" or whatever language.
This imports the existing data into a locally stored SRT directly in the built in subtitles editor page of the program.
I'm trying to put together an open source library that allows iOS devices to play files with unsupported containers, as long as the track formats/codecs are supported. e.g.: a Matroska video (MKV) file with an H264 video track and an AAC audio track. I'm making an app that surely could use that functionality and I bet there are many more out there that would benefit from it. Any help you can give (by commenting here or—even better— collaborating with me) is much appreciated. This is where I'm at so far:
I did a bit of research trying to find out how players like AVPlayerHD or Infuse can play non-standard containers and still have hardware acceleration. It seems like they transcode small chunks of the whole video file and play those in sequence instead.
It's a good solution. But if you want to throw that video to an Apple TV, things don't work as planned since the video is actually a bunch of smaller chunks being played as a playlist. This site has way more info, but at its core streaming to Apple TV is essentially a progressive download of the MP4/MPV file being played.
I'm thinking a sort of streaming proxy is the way to go. For the playing side of things, I've been investigating AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer (more info here) as a way of playing the video track. I haven't gotten to audio yet. Things get interesting when you think about the AirPlay side of things: by having a "container proxy", we can make any file look like it has the right container without the file size implications of transcoding.
It seems like GStreamer might be a good starting point for the proxy. I need to read up on it; I've never used it before. Does this approach sound like a good one for a library that could be used for App Store apps?
Thanks!
Finally got some extra time to go over GStreamer. Especially this article about how it is already updated to use the hardware decoding provided by iOS 8. So no need to develop this; GStreamer seems to be the answer.
Thanks!
The 'chucked' solution is no longer necessary in iOS 8. You should simply set up a video decode session and pass in NALUs.
https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/#513
Problem:
To get an iOS app that streams video accepted into the app store, we need to have a HLS version.
What’s the problem?
Android does not support HLS well, and for other reasons, we need to store MP4 and HLS files of the same content.
What’s the difference between MP4 and HLS and why do you need to store both?
MP4 is a container that stores H.264 video and AAC audio for best compatibility in HTML 5 browsers – jsvideo players often have flash fallback if the browser does not support MP4 video in HTML 5 that use the same MP4 file, but played through flash.
HLS is a protocol where text files (.m3u8) contain references to playlists, which themselves reference .ts files (or m2ts), which are mpeg-2 transport streams, not to be confused with mpeg-2 video. The .ts files are containers for the same H.264 video and AAC audio.
Why am I complaining?
It takes time to create the HLS files and playlists from the MP4 files
(Most importantly) We are now storing twice as much data on S3
Why should I care? If your S3 bill is $10K per month for storing both MP4 and HLS, now it is only $5K. Or put another way, if you are paying $100K for storing data in MP4, it would cost $200K to store the same content in both MP4 and HLS.
What do I want?
I want to store only the .ts files and serve both desktop users, iOS users, and Android users with that single file.
Is it possible?
Doesn’t HLS require 5-10 second .ts segments instead of one big file?
As of IETF draft 7, and version 4 of the protocol, HLS supports the tag EXT-X-BYTERANGE which allows you to specify a media segment as a byte range (subrange) of a larger URL.
Are .ts files compatible with HTML5 video?
Apparently not. They are a different container than MP4, yet contain the same video and audio content. Worth looking into how to store the raw video/audio data once and simply using the correct containers when necessary. If JS video players can convert HTML 5 MP4 files into Flash video on the fly if the browser does not support HTML 5 MP4, then why not be able to do the same with M2TS data?
I might be ignorant on some level, but maybe someone can shed some light on this issue, and possibly present a solution.
There currently is no good solution.
A little background.
Video streaming used to require custom protocols such as RTP/RTMP/RTSP etc. These protocols work fine except, we were basically building two separate networks. One HTTP based for standard web traffic, and the other one. The idea came along to split video into little chunks and serve them to the player over HTTP. This way we do not need special servers/software and we could take advantage of the giant HTTP CDNs that were being built. In addition. because the video was split into chunks, we can can encode the same video into different qualities/file sizes. Then the player can choose the best quality video for its current bandwidth. This was the perfect solution for mobile because of the constant changing network conditions. Several competing standard were developed. Move networks was the first to market [citation needed]. The design was copied by Microsoft (Smooth Streaming) and Apple (HTTP Live streaming aka HLS). Microsoft is phasing out smooth streaming in favor of DASH. DASH looks like it will become the default streaming solution of the future. Except, because of its design-by-comity approach, it has basically been stuck in comity for a few years. Now, in those few years, Apple sold Millions of IOS devices. So HLS can not just be discontinued. Why doesn't everyone just use HLS then? I can think of three reasons 1) Its Apples standard, and people are haters. 2) Transport streams are a complicate file format. and 3) Transport streams a patent encumbered. MP4 is not patent encumbered but it also does not have the adaptive abilities. This make user experience poor on 2G networks. The only network supported by the iPhone 1. Also AT&T at the time did not want full bitrate video streamed over there woefully inadequate celular network. HLS was the compromise. All of this predates HTML5. So the video tag was not even considered in its design.
Addressing your points:
1) It takes time to create the HLS files and playlists from the MP4
files
This is a programing website, Automate it.
2) We are now storing twice as much data on S3
[sic] I want to store only the .ts files and serve both desktop users,
iOS users, and Android users with that single file.
You and me both man :).
Possible solutions.
1) What is specifically wrong with Androids implementation? (except for lack of in older devices)
2) JW player can play HLS (Not sure about on android)
3) Server side transmux on demand.
Doesn’t HLS require 5-10 second .ts segments instead of one big file?
You can do byte-ranges, but you need to make sure all devices you are interested in support it.
If JS video players can convert HTML 5 MP4 files into Flash video on
the fly if the browser does not support HTML 5 MP4, then why not be
able to do the same with M2TS data?
They don't convert. Flash natively supports mp4. It is possible to convert TS in AS3/JS. I have done it. JW player can convert TS in browser. video.js may be able to as well.
I have a website that has a variety of embedded YouTube videos. When a user pauses a given video I want a screenshot to be taken of the playing video. Now, I've taken many approaches in tackling this problem such as copying the video frame to canvas (this doesn't work because the videos are external to my site), and also through the use of FFMpeg, and FFMpeg-PHP. The latter two- although very powerful- also do not work as the given piece of media has to be hosted on my server.
I'm at my wits end about what to do as I've spent countless hours trying to do this, and I'm ready to accept defeat.
Any ideas?
Regards,
Andre.
There's no supported method in the YouTube Player or Data API to take a screenshot of an arbitrary frame of a video.
I used the img.youtube.com/vi path to get the image. The function getScreen basically parses the youtube url and grabs the &v= argument to get the video id.
Since I use youtube.com/embed/ url format, then I had to rework the function a little to get the video id.
http://mistonline.in/wp/get-youtube-video-screenshot-using-simple-php-and-javascript/#
I'm putting together a site that will include some instructional videos that will be 1 to 3 minutes long. The users will be accessing these through standard and mobile browsers. I'm particularly concerned with users of i-devices, such as iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.
To deliver the videos, I'm will probably use videojs.com player - it seems like a pretty robust choice. Unfortunately, I don't know first thing about what file formats and standards to use for encoding files. H.264 Baseline profile seems to be a good choice, but I really need some direction on where to read up on what might be the best choice.
Please help :)
The best resource I've found for this information is Dive Into HTML 5. They have a very concise breakdown of which formats will work with each of the browsers.
The long and short of it, however, is that h264 baseline is the way to go, especially if your HTML5 video player has Flash failover.
While HTML5 video is currently the standard in the mobile space, a back of the envelope calculation reveals that only about 40% of desktop browsers users can view it as compared to Flash's 99%+ market penetration. Moreover, you'd have to encode and store your videos twice (h264 and Theora) in order to reach all HTML5 video capable browsers.
However, by using h264 video and a Flash failover, you can cover all iDevices plus all browser that either don't support HTML5 video, or support HTML5 video for a format other than h264.
One word of warning: iDevices only support the h264 baseline up to level 3.0, so make sure to stay within these specs.
Hopefully that helps.