Writing an app to stream video to iPhone

Question

I'm interested in creating an iPhone app that can stream video from a central server, YouTube style. I was wondering if anyone has ever tried to do this before, what is the path of least resistant, existing APIs, etc? I really know nothing about how this is generally done. Would I be working with sockets? Just looking for some direction here. Thanks!

Answer 1

QuickTime videos already stream to the phone. The path of least resistance would be to use the media player controller and point it to a streaming media file on a streaming server.

Answer 2

If you have the streaming server up and ready, it is quite easy to implement a video controller that pops up youtube-style.

NSString *videoURLString = @"http://path-to-iphone-compliant-video-stream";
NSURL *videoURL = [NSURL URLWithString:videoURLString];
MPMoviePlayerController moviePlayer = [[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:videoURL]; 
[moviePlayer prepareToPlay]; 
[moviePlayer play];
[self.view addSubview:moviePlayer.view];

You need to handle the controller that display the video player's view (which is self in this case).

In iOS 3.2+ MPMoviePlayerViewController make it even easier:

NSString *videoURLString = @"http://path-to-iphone-compliant-video-stream";
NSURL *videoURL = [NSURL URLWithString:videoURLString];
MPMoviePlayerViewController *moviePlayerView = [[[MPMoviePlayerViewController alloc] initWithContentURL:videoURL] autorelease];
[self presentMoviePlayerViewControllerAnimated:moviePlayerView];

presentMoviePlayerViewControllerAnimated is a MediaPlayer's additional method to FWViewController that you will find in iOS 3.2+ and it takes care of creating a view controller and pushing it on the stack, animating it with a slide-from-bottom animation, as in youtube.app.

Answer 3

good tutorial on how to stream video:

http://buildmobilesoftware.com/2010/08/09/how-to-stream-videos-on-the-iphone-or-ipad/