Show HN: iOS app streams MPG video to browsers via WebSockets, decodes in JS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: iOS app streams MPG video to browsers via WebSockets, decodes in JS

instant-webcam.com

31 pointsphoboslab9 comments

Have you tested this on an ipad 2/iPad mini (As display)? I am not posting this to say it doesn't work but It is very choppy/almost-unusable even on the lowest quality. I can run quality and size at 2/3 from iPhone -> computer but it's still a little jittery. That said I am using an iPhone 4S so that might have something to do with it.

As a whole the idea is awesome, the app is beautiful, and setup is a breeze! Great job!

The iPhone4S only reaches about ~25fps for the medium video size when encoding. iOS only provides hardware acceleration for h264 encoding, but not for mpeg1. iPhone5 should be full 30fps for all sizes, though.

Decoding in Mobile Safari or Chrome for Android only works well with the lowest video size setting (on the devices I tested anyway).

When scrolling the page, the first texts (in grey) become really hard to read on the background (using Firefox on Mac OS X) and I had to select the text to read it properly. It displays fine on the white parts of the background but I have the habit to scroll to have the text I'm reading on top and here it overlays with your chairs in background

Thanks; I made the background scroll up a bit faster.

Still depends largely on the width of your browser window, though. Maybe the scrolling speed should adapt to it...

That really is an amazing tech demo. Will you be making the source available?

I'm currently writing a blog post on how to do this with ffmpeg on a Raspberry Pi - or any other device that has ffmpeg and a webcam.

The source for the MPEG1 decoder is available[1], but missing streaming support at the moment. I will push the new version soon.

[1] http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/05/mpeg1-video-decoder-in-java...

Dominic, you're such a boss! I love it, thanks! :)

forward port 80 to an old iPhone and you have an instant cam over the internet :)

I like the idea but using MPEG1 in place of h.264 because of it doesn't rely on built in decoders is kind of an odd choice. Is the author here to talk more about that? Was it because of the ease of implementation with jsmpeg and how much effort it would be to modify an existing player to accommodate the websocket input? Or is it a licensing issue?

Also I'm curious how much effort it was to get MPEG streaming from iOS. I've been working on getting HTTP-Live streaming using h.264 from iOS to the server lately as an experiment and this project is fascinating to me. I've been relying on built in h.264 encoding and then using open source C libraries for the streaming/segmenting aspects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com