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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AirPlay and HDMI

If you develop gaming or multimedia applications for iOS, then AirPlay is absolutely a must for you, almost a standard. Indeed, what could be better for a user than watching favorite videos or photos on a big screen of a plasma TV or playing advanced games using iPhone/iPad/iPod as a multi-touch joystick? AirPlay has been designed specifically for this purpose. Continue reading

iOS Player with VAST Video Ad Support

apple-advertising

Ads based monetization has been widely adopted by the developers of free-of-charge iOS applications. To support banner ads in such applications, Apple offers a ready solution. However if your application is built around a video player, you may prefer inline ads shown in video pauses. As far as we know, no widely used free solution yet exists for this. In this post, we’ll tell you how you can easily add video ads to your app. For this purpose, you’ll have to add our free iOS VAST Player library to the OpenX ad server. 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