Live Streaming Topic

Question

This could be quite an intresting topic for people who are intrested in livestreaming from your device to a webserver. (P

Answer 1

It strikes me that http posting is probably not a good way to do live streaming of video to your server. Other people have been playing with live streaming and they've used a socket to broadcast live video streams and audio streams to their servers.

I thought this was fascinating -- here's a link.

http://www.mattakis.com/blog/kisg/20090708/broadcasting-video-with-android-without-writing-to-the-file-system

But the guy also posted a partial code sample -

String hostname = "your.host.name";
int port = 1234;

Socket socket = new Socket(InetAddress.getByName(hostname), port);

ParcelFileDescriptor pfd = ParcelFileDescriptor.fromSocket(socket);

MediaRecorder recorder = new MediaRecorder();

// Additional MediaRecorder setup (output format ... etc.) omitted

recorder.setOutputFile(pfd.getFileDescriptor());

recorder.prepare();

recorder.start();

The cool part I didn't know about is the ParcelFileDescriptor - which creates a file on the android filesystem that is actually a pipe to a socket - so anything that gets written to the file gets broadcast out over the web to a remote server. Sockets are the right way to go about doing this sort of thing too because they allow you to continuously send data until your recording is complete without having to re-send headers over and over.

What I think is cool about this technique is that he's literally taking the output from MediaRecorder (which is going to be an encoded video stream) and pumping it over a socket to his server. Then he can simply save out the data that's coming in over the socket. No frame by frame, no processing (Android SDK doesn't expose the encoders in the SDK very well and they're pretty performance intensive).

People report that it works, but I haven't tested. Anyway, hope this is helpful.

Answer 2

1) What would be the best method for live streaming WITH audio? Video Recording OR my method + Audio recording?

This really depends on your view of "best". If you are looking for resources and not the quality, then your way is really good. Otherwise, you should use a native streaming mechanism or maybe implement a video streaming technique to stream and encode video.

3) How would you stream audio to the webserver? (Main goal) (With Java, PHP and JavaScript)

I suggest that you stick to MediaRecorder because it really does what your doing in a good way. Still try to find a way to get the stream in order to send in your way as files are not the best choice although you could stick to files and send small files in a timely manner. In this way you could put a bigger portion of the load on the server rather than the client.

4) I am also planning to add typical live streaming feautures to i, e.g. when a famous person appears, you could have the ability to show his name while you are live streaming, or just add an image from your sd directory to your livestream. Would you also decode it and overlay the image, or put the image in your livestream in some way?

Do not even try to put it in your livestream. With your php server, you have more capabilities to send this info alone with certain tag and let the server do the processing or maybe integration of these with the video

Answer 3

You are sending a whole snapshot each time? Why don't you try to use some video compressing techniques, like instead of sending a full image each time you send a compressed version (maybe a diff or something like that) and them on the server you create the image based on your last image and the data just received. I think all video codecs do this, you could try looking at some of the open codecs specification to get some ideas.

About audio. I would send the audio stream separated and them sync it with the video streaming based on which video frame we are showing right now.

Basically, I would try to get my streaming as close as possible to how a real video streaming works. Maybe you could look into ffmpeg, ffmpeg has an rtsp server if you could build that for android them you would simplify your work a lot.

Answer 4

Note: I'm not an Android developer.

From what you've said it seems like your just taking a snapshot instead of any real streaming. If your worried about bandwidth then use a lower resolution. Exactly how to do this in android I'm not sure

I think that if there's built in streaming classes that you'll be able to get both the video stream and the audio stream. Don't do any local transcoding (your raw2jpg() counts as transcoding) as it might use too much processing power. Just take the stream, compress it, and send it to your server.

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EDIT:

Some Links to get you started

• An interesting project that turns the Android phone into an IP camera. You could dig around the code to figure out how they get ahold of the camera stream
• An SO question on this topic