The iPad/iOS has video streaming support for e.g. H.264 using MPMoviePlayerController etc., but i receive H.264 data through a custom, proprietary, stream and need to decode it in a soft real-time scenario.
Can the iPads/iOS' video decoder be accessed in any way to decode this data?
Update: Apparently the iOS 4.0 Core Media Framework supports decoding frames and knows of H.264, but there is no sample code nor can i see what i actually am supposed to call for the actual decoding.
Have you tried writing the H.264 stream that you receive from your protocol to a temporary file which you continually append to, and then once you have written enough bytes to avoid buffering playback, passing the url of your temp file to MPMoviePlayerController?
If you continue to have problems with it, I suggest you take a look at libavcodec for decoding the data (available on the ffmpeg project).
There are great ffmpeg tutorials at dranger that show how to properly decode (through libavcodec) and display video data (using libsdl), among other things.
After raising the issue with Apple DTS it turns out that there currently is no way to decode video data from custom stream sources.
I will file an enhancement request for this.