I Need Advice For Streaming Video Decoding

I have this labeled “tvOS,” but it applies to MacOS and iOS, as well.

I am looking at solutions for decoding and displaying streaming video from RT[S]P streams (UDP, mostly, but possible TCP, as well).

Apple is not so good at supporting this stuff, and I’ve been using VLCKit/MobileVLCKit/tvVLCKit for my test harnesses. It’s a fairly performant library that can decode pretty much anything I throw at it.

However, it is the resource pig from hell (especially with tvOS), and there are probably licensing issues for use in commercial products.

I’ve looked at a few commercial offerings (I have no problem paying for a decent library), and have been rather underwhelmed. Most seem to be ffmpeg wrappers.

ffmpeg is fine for MacOS, but I don’t think that it will be useful for tvOS or iOS.

Can anyone point me to any projects that can help me to decode streaming video (primarily from surveillance gear), and display them on Mac-, i- and tvOS; preferably without draining the battery or stalling too much?

Thanks!

Ah…well. Looks like this isn’t a particularly good place to ask these types of questions.

@lilgreenviper Do you still have issues with this?

Yup. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only effective non-Apple media library for native iOS is MobileVLCKit.

So I am taking a different tack. I’m writing a streaming server for Mac, using ffmpeg: The Streaming Chronicles – Little Green Viper

I have the first phase done (a standalone RTSP-to-HLS converter) working, but the latency is unacceptable.

I am pretty sure that a big reason is that I am insisting on HLS as an output format. I will be looking at adding an MPEG-DASH UDP output, and see if that helps. WebKit seems to be able to natively stream DASH.

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