Browser-Aware Player

May 16, 2010 |   |  2 Comments  |  Internet Campus, streaming, Web 2.0

One of the big challenges of streaming to the web is the sheer diversity of devices out there.

This past week, I pushed out some modifications to the player code on our live page that switches the player code based on what the user is connecting with. The genesis of this change was a problem with our change to JW Player Version 5 causing our PlayStation users to no longer be able to watch our video since JW v5 requires Flash 10 and Sony apparently doesn’t care about its customers. After a successful test with the Playstation, I extended the code to provide an HTML5 <VIDEO> tag for our iPhone users (allowing us to clear up some the clutter on the sidebar), as well as MMS and RTSP links around a graphic mimicking the Flash-based player in order to provide a consistent user experience for our Android/WebOS/BlackBerry/WinMo users.

EDIT: The main reason I’m not doing straight HTML5 with Flash fallback (a much more elegant solution) is that we’re sending out VP6 for our flash users and a lower-bandwidth h.264 stream for our mobile users. We’re not currently using h.264 for our flash users because of the poor quality of the h.264 encoder in Flash Media Live Encoder. Once we get a “real encoder“, we’ll send out a single set of h.264 streams and use HTML5 with fallback.

The code is here.

Making Sense of Mobile Streaming

January 6, 2010 |   |  8 Comments  |  streaming

Now that we’ve gotten streaming to computers down pat, I’ve set my sights on delivering a good experience for mobile users. Unfortunately, with the wide variety of mobile platforms out there, this is not an especially easy task. The Mac/PC/Linux issues are complicated enough, and it gets really tricky when the platform ecosystem has half a dozen major players (and a truckload of minor ones)

Since July or so, we’ve been using a preview version of the recently released Wowza V2 server software to deliver our video content to iPhone/iPod devices that support Apple’s new HTTP Streaming format. With minimal changes, Wowza V2 can also rebroadcast the same H.264/AAC stream over RTSP, which reaches a lot more devices. But this is where it gets complicated. BlackBerry has been supporting RTSP for some time, but it’s only recently that they’ve supported h.264/AAC media. According to their KB article on the subject, you can do H.264 on the following:

  • Bold 9000/9700
  • Tour 9630
  • Storm 9500/9520/9530/9550
  • Curve 8900/8520

Most HTC phones have a streaming media app that supports RTSP, but only recent versions seem support H.264. For example, my Mogul has the app, but I can only hear the audio. Brian‘s Touch Pro 2 gets both (and on the TP2’s WVGA screen, it looks amazing!).

Windows Media Player supports RTSP, but doesn’t come with an H.264 codec (even in Windows 7!!!! BOOO!!!!). I have yet to get the RTSP stream to work on Windows Media Player. The mobile player doesn’t support RTSP at all, just MMS and HTTP (but not the same HTTP as Apple! Grr!), and with the 9.5 generation of Windows Media Services (2008), MMS has gone away in favor of HTTP (which Microsoft calls Smooth Streaming, also not supported on WiMo).

The Palm Pre is supposedly able to do RTSP and H.264, but I’m waiting to hear back from one of our pre-wielding pastors to see if this is actually the case.

Thanks to Daryl Hunter at lifechurch.tv for letting me know that it works on his HTC Hero (Android 1.5). It seems that on Android you can’t manually enter an RTSP URL into the browser bar, but a web link or tinyurl redirect that goes to an RTSP URL does work.

Meanwhile, VLC player will play just about anything you throw at it, including the RTMP flash stream. Pity it’s not available in a mobile version.

So, as it stands now, in order to deliver a mobile experience to as many people as possible, I’m still going to need to run a separate Windows Media server for our Windows Mobile clients, But everyone else should be able to pull from the “iPhone” stream (which I’m probably going to need to rename), as long as the device supports H.264/AAC and RTSP.

 

Liveblogging from the road!

April 1, 2008 |   |  Comment  |  nerd, Wireless

As promised, I’m rolling down I-35, chatting on IRC, and having a webcam chat over MSN with my dad (who uses a Linksys EVDO router for his access at home). Matt is hacking code from his laptop. Clif is paying attention to the road. Since we’re gonna be on interstate highway the whole way, we can pretty much count on a solid EVDO connection the whole way.

I’ve got a running ping going to 4.2.2.2 (a public DNS server). It’s interesting to watch the ping times start to get a little long, then we lose a packet, and then the ping times drop back down to the low 100s. I’m guessing those are tower handoffs. The fact that it works at all is nothing short of miraculous.