After doing many tests with my buddy who has an iPhone I was unable to get any sort of streaming working via the Safari browser.
I have encoded and tested the following:
mpeg4 + aac (hinted non hinted)
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doesn’t work via DSS or direct html link Safari doesn’t understand RTSP and http:// linked videos it wants to load into memory.
h264 + aac (hinted non hinted)
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doesn’t work via DSS or direct html link Safari doesn’t understand RTSP and http:// linked videos it wants to load into memory.
Asking my buddy to visit m.youtube.com via safari and test a video from the page also doesn’t work for him either.
Error: safari can’t open the page because the address is invalid
So, unless you can develop your own custom application like the youtube one right now looks like we are out of luck.
User Agent String for iPhone is:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
If anyone comes up with a solution I would love to hear it.
Filed under: Encoding, General Info, H264, mpeg4 by admin
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Today is the day when people line up to get the next generation in mobile phones. iPhone hysteria is on the loose and you cant escape hearing about iPhones in the news and on the net. I wont be getting an iPhone any time soon esp since It would require me to break my Sprint contract and go with Cingular/AT&T and loose my beloved EDVO data speeds to EDGE.
With all of that said anyone who has an iPhone would you please visit the best video sites and test out a few videos at http://mvstreamer.mobi .
I’m also looking for any videos encoded for the iPhone so I can add in streaming support for iPhone users. I don’t expect this to look nice since the video specs are 320×240 or 640×480 at EDGE data rates which isn’t great and not to mention the latency issue. I will be adding bigger video sizes soon but don’t expect any miracles for those screen sizes, getting a good looking qcif video at the current data rates on EDGE is tough enough with out turning it into a blocky slide show.
iPhone Specs from Apple:
Video formats supported: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 768 Kbps, 320 by 240 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
UPDATE: My buddy is in line for his iPhone so Ill be able to do some tests soon, but I would still like to hear from other iPhone users.
Filed under: Encoding by admin
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As of late the SVN builds of ffmpeg have been changing the configuration args to compile ffmpeg and encoding options after the software is compiled. I wanted to befiely mention the changes I have noticed.
My original compile options for ffmpeg : --extra-cflags=-I/usr/local/include --extra-ldflags=-L/usr/local/lib --disable-debug --enable-mp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-vorbis --enable-faad --enable-faadbin --enable-faac --enable-pthreads --enable-xvid --enable-x264 --enable-a52 --enable-a52bin --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_nb-fixed --enable-amr_wb --enable-memalign-hack --enable-shared --enable-gpl
Things that have changed are the addition of adding “lib” do most everything.. So –enable-xvid will be –enable-libxvid. Most of these can be found by typing ./configuration –help
So this is just a fyi if you haven’t compiled ffmpeg in a while to prob add “lib” to most everything 
The next changes have to do when encoding video and most of them deal with changes in the audio switches.
changes:
old: -acodec amr_nb
new: -acodec libamr_nb
old: -ab 12
new: -ab 12.2k or various other options but all require “k” behind them.
old: -acodec aac
new: -acodec libfaac
hopefully this helps out and your not pulling your hair out or Googling around to find the changes cause well apprently their is no good change log with this type of information.
Filed under: Encoding, General Info by admin
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With my busy schedule as of late and the lack of the ability to update,write code and make enhancements I’m looking for someone to help donate their coding skills to further my work in mobile streaming. I would like to work with someone who has a great vision and can think/code outside of the box. The ultimate goal is to release alot of my work to the public but for now I want to get things stable enough before doing so. So if you have some extra time and are good at php/mysql/perl please drop me a note in the contact form.
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I just wanted to open up something I have been working on in on the side and that is taking the content from Revision 3 and converting it to mobile phones for streaming play back. I’m now opening this up to the public to test and provide feedback. Over the past few months I have been doing a lot of testing and getting a lot of great feedback on mobile streaming.
So now I feel like I can share some of my work to the public and Revision 3 is a prefect site that offers great shows for both web and iPod playback. I felt that they were missing a mobile version of their site so decided to tackle that project which fit right into the things I was working on.
(more…)
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I’m looking for some dedicated beta testers who mobile phones that can stream video. This is for a side project im working on which will be released to the public soon. (I hope)
What I need is:
- Mobile Streaming phones
- Decent Network connectivity (3g, EDVO, Edge, etc) – Fast networks
- Various people from all over the world
- People who will provide feedback and help solve issues.
Head on over to the Contact page and Put BETA REQUEST in the subject and please provide some details about what I’m looking for above.
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Well, many of you are probably wondering how to convert a non 4:3 type of video into qcif (176×144) and keep the aspect ratio of the video. This is a bit tricky and isn’t an exact science due to the nature mpeg. Most mobile phones can handle qcif resolution but anything smaller or bigger could cause issues and since we are trying to support as many handsets as possible here is my proposed solution.
First you figure out what resolution your current video is as. So im going to use the super man trailer I have been testing with as an example which is at 1280×544, which is in some sort of wide screen video format.
(more…)
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Ok, this has been a thorn in my side and I have been doing a bit of research and tests with out much luck so far.
The issue is taking content that is shot in HD and converting it to the mobile phone screen but keeping the proper aspect of the HD content. This leads to a few issues, first of all QCIF (Quarter Common Intermediate format – 176×144) which is at 4:3 aspect ratio.
A test clip im using is at the resolution of 1280×544, its not quite 720p resolution which is 1280×720 but thats besides the point, taking that resolution and fitting it into QCIF causes the aspect of the HD clip to fit to the 4:3 ratio.
The problem is encoding it at a lower res than 176×144 can cause issues with some mobile phones, ie QCIF is a very strict standard resolution that mobile phones have stuck to and some players blow up if its not at the proper res.
What im trying to figure out is how to convert down the clip and use -padtop , -padbottom and -padcolor ffmpeg settings which are supposed to create crop bars for you in black. I have yet to get a result that I like so far. So Im wondering if anyone has a suggestion to do this with either ffmpeg or mencoder.
Filed under: Encoding by admin
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I have finally been able to pull my self away from coding to start working on this blog. The idea of this blog is to figure out this big beast we call mobile streaming. As some of you may already know from your own tests what works on one mobile phone doesn’t worth on another. This is a huge stumbling block for any sort of developer.
Just imagine that you a web developer and instead of 4 big browsers you have to worry about, you have to worry about 200+ or more. This is the current issue we face with mobile development from web design to functionality such as video playback or streaming.
Ill be the first to admit this is a huge undertaking however if I can get you (the community) involved in testing and feedback maybe we can solve some of the issues that are currently plaguing mobile streaming.
I’m looking forward to your participation.
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