iPhone streaming debugging information

Question

Hi there, I'm looking for a way (doesn't need to be app-store save!!) to get ahold of video-streaming-relevant debugging information.

What I'm trying to do, is to write an application that opens a video stream and displays information like:

• framerate
• bitrate audio / video
• etc etc.
• codec information

basically i want to display as much information for any given stream.

Thanks for any information in advance, best regards

sam

Answer 1

Even though you tagged your question with MPMoviePlayerController, that class probably isn't going to help you out very much. First of all, there's a limited amount of information you can access from it at a high level, certainly nothing about codecs and audio bitrate. And even if the class does store this type of information somehow, your app would be disqualified from being in the iTunes App Store if you access non-public methods or properties.

Secondly, MPMoviePlayerController only supports a limited number of codecs itself, namely the ones that can be decoded in hardware on the iPhone/iPad (H.264 baseline and MPEG-4 videos).

Anyways, a good option could be FFMpeg for the iPhone. Getting the information you need seems to be much more straightforward this way; check out this blog post for a nice tutorial for using the libraries.

I'm not sure about the potential legal issues concerning distributing such a program in the App Store, but if you statically link it with your binary that would at least satisfy Apple... you'll have to check the FFMpeg Legal Site for their end.