Live Streaming on iOS

In our work, we often need to implement video streaming from iOS devices in real-time or near real-time. A common example is the use of iOS devices as surveillance cameras or creation of streaming applications like Periscope. Problem statement often imposes additional requirements like enabling of stream playback on another device or running the app smoothly in the browser or VLC player, low latency (video streaming in near real-time), low resource consumption (long battery life), no need in a dedicated media server, etc.

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OSMF HLS Plugin

http streaming hero

Having been involved in the Together project, I was assigned a task to enable Apple HLS video playback on the Flash platform. Video content delivery in a single format (HLS in this case) is usually very easy and offers many benefits. To process video, Flash has an open source OSMF framework that can be easily enhanced with various plugins. But there is one problem: the framework is absolutely HLS-agnostic. Adobe promoted RTMP first, and only then offered HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) as an alternative to Apple HLS. In this post, we’ll cover a free HLS plugin that we have developed to run HLS in OSMF-enabled video players. Continue reading

HTTP Live Streaming Cookbook Updated!

ios-video-hls

Creating technically seamless applications has always been a pretty tough task in terms of time and complexity. Moreover, helpful data is scattered across multiple sources. This also applies to iOS video applications development. In this post, we have aggregated the most vital and helpful information on efficient use of all the features of HTTP Live Streaming, with detailed data source list. These materials are prerequisite to anyone who intends to ensure high quality of viewing experience. Continue reading

iOS DRM: Secure iOS Video Delivery and Playback

HTTP Live Streaming (HTTP LS) is a protocol strongly recommended and actively promoted by Apple as the best solution for online video delivery to mobile devices. But neither the protocol itself, nor its tools offered by the iOS API, implement a full-fledged DRM support. The new version of Adobe Access 4.0 adds this missing functionality to the iOS-devices. Continue reading

HTML5 <video> Analytics

If you offer online video services, no doubt you have not once thought of video views analytics. In a Flash-based OSMF framework, there is GTrackPlugin to collect statistics on content viewing. Also, you can also use our OSMF Video Analytics.

However, if your service HTML5 based, you need a purpose designed viewing analytics. To build such a plugin, HTML5 Media API should be used. For more on this API, read this post on HTML5 player implementation. Continue reading

HTML5 Video Player Development

HTML5 JS Player

Year by year, we become more involved with media technology than ever before. The World Wide Web is also sensitive to this trend as shown by immense success and popularity of online video services, such as YouTube. However, you cannot run such systems without the technology for video content playback at the end user level.

A classical approach is to build a video player with Flash. Probably you can hardly find a more popular Web browser plugin than Flash Player today. However, a weakness of this approach is the necessity to install the Flash plugin, missing from many devices by default. For example, whatsoever popular iPhone and iPad are, they cannot run Flash applications from within the browser. The way out of this situation is to use HTML5. Continue reading

How to Develop AIR Video Applications for Android

android video apps

Today, smart phones and tablets have become integral parts of our daily life. People interact with such devices frequently and lengthly over a day. So, mobile and tablet applications have become important channels for content distribution. Launching of virtually any major service includes ad-hoc application development. Segmentation of mobile applications greatly increases the cost to implement a mobile strategy. Adobe AIR allows you to reduce the cost-to-market for cross-platform services. You can develop your application once and then adapt it easily to a range of devices or screens (also, there’s more dexterous Flash developers on the market than iOS or Android experts). In this article, we’ll dwell on some features regarding development of mobile applications with Adobe AIR. Continue reading

Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5

flash media server

Version-to-version, fans of any software product expect innovations or even dramatic improvements from their favorite package. No doubt this applies to content delivery servers. Well, what users expect from a streaming server today? They want it “to be quick, safe, easy and stream to all devices at once”. In fact, those were the criteria used by Adobe in developing the new version of Flash Media Server 4.5. In this post, we’ll review the main innovations and improvements of the new media server announced a few hours before. You can read the press release here. Continue reading

Video Portals

Video player

Online video is growing increasingly popular every day. Many Internet portals offer online video features to their users. We would like to offer you the list of popular video portal so you can get familiar with the online video strategies of the largest Web, telecom and media companies. We hope that this will possibly inspire you to implementing new features in your own projects. Continue reading

Flash Video Player Development

Дизайн видео плееров

More and more Web resources need to publish video, and sometimes even the whole Web project is built around a video player. Video player development often starts with a concept and design in mind. The technical part of the issue is largely covered by a multitude of multimedia frameworks (primarily OSMF) and video player skinning options. In this post, we would like to show you some well-known examples of video players. We hope they will inspire you to give rise to your own video player concept and design. Continue reading