Miscellany

Week 1.2: Phase One “Complete,” But…

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This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series The Streaming Chronicles

…the latency (the time between when the camera sees something, and the output renderer displays it) is TERRIBLE (about 15 seconds). The quality is great, but that’s pretty much irrelevant, if you are interested in a “real time” display.

After poking around, I see that the reason is really because I’m choosing to use HLS. Basically, “You can’t get there from here.”

Some latency is expected (indeed, several of the devices I test with have built-in latency), but I’d like to be able to get better than “This is what happened fifteen seconds ago.”

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Week One: Setting Up Phase 1

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This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series The Streaming Chronicles

Now that I know (pretty much) where I’m going, I can start to set things up.

Here’s the repo.

Here’s the GitHub Pages for the project.

Here’s the tag for Week 1.

I will be writing the server in Swift. It’s the current “must have” language for Apple development, and I’ve been using it for the last five years. It’s a great language, and I’m happy to be working in it.

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Week “Zero”: The Basics

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This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series The Streaming Chronicles

This week saw some basic feasibility work, and establishment of some “infrastructure” to support the project, going forward.

As I have stated before, I prefer to use a “make it up as I go along” project planning methodology. The less structure, the better. I consider overdeveloped structure to be “concrete galoshes.“

With that in mind, the first thing that I did, was to create my “napkin sketch” of the project.

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Preface

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This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series The Streaming Chronicles

It all started with a bug.

I am in the process of writing a library that will act as an ONVIF driver for Apple operating systems, and had gotten to writing a test harness for tvOS.

My test harnesses use the excellent VLCKit to display streams from devices. This is a library that is designed to be integrated into software projects, giving them the ability to display video of almost any format.

It’s an excellent resource, but is quite “heavy,” in its requirements for resources, and has licensing issues. The licensing issues aren’t that big a deal for me, but the “heavy” is, so I knew that I’d need to find a different streaming library before trying to do anything that even smelled commercial; especially for mobile devices.

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