iPhone video streaming

Mobile devices have changed the way people look at the web recently. Now the web is more personal than ever and more mobile than ever expected before. Video has also transformed the web … and recently these two movements collided!

I’ll talk briefly about the main problems that needed to be solved to get video to mobile phones. Read on…

Need for unified video format for mobile devices

For the video revolution on the web that format was and still is Flash Video. Flash is present on about every web capable device except iOS based ones. The problem of flash on mobile phones is that most of them(except newer Android based ones which have Flash) can’t handle Flash because they lack sufficient processing power to play the video. So a simpler, standard, directly playable video format was needed which came with MP4/H.264 container for the iOS devices pushing for the HTML5 <video> tag.

Note that the HTML5 video embedding method is available for personal computers too, but there is a lot less browser support for it there due to limitations of HTML5, different opinions on format, licensing issues and of course the already existing solution with Flash Video.

Sufficient processing power for video playback

Video requires substantial processing power for decoding and postprocessing. On iOS devices like iPad/iPhone a standard and modular video format /codec combination allows this low processing power devices to use hardware decoder chips to deliver video efficiently. Software decoding is out of question and flexibility is also limited. iPhone and iPad are the same thing when it comes to processing power despite the size difference.

Energy efficiency when playing video

Energy efficiency is very important for a mobile devices playing video, simply because you wouldn’t be very mobile if you need a power cord every 30 minutes. Video decoding chips are up to 10 times more energy efficient than software decoding which is a big gain.

iPhone http video streaming protocol

With live video for iPhone there it is needed for a protocol to deliver the video to the internal video player of the browser. Apple designed a solution based on the HTTP protocol and MPEG_TS containers. Basically the video is split into multiple files called “segments” and a configuration file called “index”. Each segment contains a part of the video for example 10 seconds and all segments are listed in the index. In the case with live video segments are created “on the fly”(read 1 segment delay at best) and the player repeatedly downloads and plays them. This is as basic as it gets with video – simple and it works(mostly).

and here comes iPhone video streaming … to the web

iPhone comes with a “full” Safari browser(which is not exactly true). This browser supports the HTML5 <video> tag and thus can play a video on a web page. No more empty placeholders for flash video players … or so they hope.

Video hosting sites/services are starting to provide solutions to allow video to iPhone users too.

Since it is HTTP and there are many tools to generate the segmented files it is not difficult to publish video for iPhone with a regular web server. If you need to scale most CDN’s will do just fine. The actual problem is merging the iPhone/iPad users with your “normal” users in your existing site so it would work for them all and not just one or the other.

and finally … (drums)

I’m proud to announce that at streamingvideoprovider.com we have implemented  iPhone /iPad streaming for live and on-demand video for all our existing users including video players published in websites as early as 2006. Video to iPhone/iPad users will just work on your website with us.

and here is an iPhone video example

If you read this page with a iOS device you would see a native html5 video player otherwise you will see a flash player.

P.S. It’s a full HD video and some older iPhones may come short.