Lextech Enables First Ever Live Streaming of an Event Direct to iPhone for iPhoneDevCamp

by AlexBratton
August 1, 2009

Our broadcasting of the iPhoneDevCamp event to as many as 1000 remote users around the world on their iPhones has been a great success. We believe this is the first time ever that a live event has been broadcast with audio & video directly to iPhone end users. Using the new HTTP video streaming protocol built into the iPhone OS 3.0 we were able to custom crunch some existing technologies and make them work to pull video from a high quality Axis camera, transcode the video and chunk it out into the file based protocol required for this new streaming and make it available on an iPhone optimized web site.

You can see the live feeds as well as archived videos from the event as we continually update over the weekend at http://iphonedevcamp.lextech.com

We gave a presentation last night on how we set up the video infrastructure and how this new video protocol works.

The basics of our implementation are:

 

  • Axis HD video camera streaming RTSP H.264 in an mpeg2 wrapper
  • VLC grabbing the RTSP stream and converting it to HTTP. This feed is then split off in HD and made available to the satellite locations (running on Mac Book Pro #1)
  • FFMPEG to transcode the video to 320x240 for the iPhone piped to stout (running on Mac Book Pro #2)
  • Additional FFMPEGs running simultaneously so we can stream live and break between events more smoothly (also running on Mac Book Pro #2)
  • an open source media segmenter reading stdin and then outputing the required series of small video files to a file system (running on Mac Book Pro #2)
  • a remote file system mount directly to one of our servers using Mac FUSE over SSH to securely upload files out of Yahoo
  • Apache httpd letting users access the files on their iPhone (remote web server at Lextech)

 

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Comments

Not really first

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 08/08/2009 - 05:47.

Hi there. Congrats on getting it to work o open source and free tools. But actually Telemak does live streaming to iPhones even before OS 3 was released, albeith using very costly solutions.

Best regrards

Christophe Lenaerts
CEO
www.telemak.com

Re: Not really first

Submitted by Alex (not verified) on Tue, 08/11/2009 - 15:02.

Christophe,

We're referring to having done the live streaming using the new HTTP based video protocol that Apple introduced in the 3.0 OS (thus the collection of tools to make it work). Being built into the new OS will allow a lot of exciting growth in the video streaming to iPhone market place. We've been doing live streaming since the first days of the iPhone as well in the video surveillance world but that has typically required additional software so it's great to see more options being added to the core platform.

Alex Bratton

This was pretty awesome.

Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 08/02/2009 - 10:56.

Saw chunks of the keynote and announcements on my phone, live, and got the definite feeling I was viewing history. Really nice hack! Kent Brewster (@kentbrew)

Re: This was pretty awesome

Submitted by AlexBratton on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 22:21.

Kent, thanks.  It's great to hear you were able to join in live. We were really excited to put that all together.