ios4 - What's the best way of live streaming iphone camera to a media server?

Question

According to this What Techniques Are Best To Live Stream iPhone Video Camera Data To a Computer? is possible to get compressed data from iphone camera, but as I've been reading in the AVFoundation reference you only get uncompressed data.

So the questions are:

1) How to get compressed frames and audio from iPhone's camera?

2) Encoding uncompressed frames with ffmpeg's API is fast enough for real-time streaming?

Any help will be really appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You most likely already know....

1) How to get compressed frames and audio from iPhone's camera?

You can not do this. The AVFoundation API has prevented this from every angle. I even tried named pipes, and some other sneaky unix foo. No such luck. You have no choice but to write it to file. In your linked post a user suggest setting up the callback to deliver encoded frames. As far as I am aware this is not possible for H.264 streams. The capture delegate will deliver images encoded in a specific pixel format. It is the Movie Writers and AVAssetWriter that do the encoding.

2) Encoding uncompressed frames with ffmpeg's API is fast enough for real-time streaming?

Yes it is. However, you will have to use libx264 which gets you into GPL territory. That is not exactly compatible with the app store.

I would suggest using AVFoundation and AVAssetWriter for efficiency reasons.