[mythtv] Possible playback scenarios for the iPhone

[Kevin Kuphal]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2008 at 2:13 PM, Chase Douglas <chasedouglas.lists at gmail.com>
wrote:

>   On Jul 19, 2008, at 5:19 PM, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>
>  On Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 5:58 PM, Chase Douglas <
> chasedouglas.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I am interested in developing a frontend for the iPhone with live tv
>> playback, but there are two hurdles along the way:
>>
>> 1. Content is encoded in the format coming from the tuner device, and
>> as far as I am aware, no tuning device outputs an iPhone compatible
>> format
>>
>> 2. The iPhone SDK (I'm trying to keep this under Apple's terms as
>> well) has no streaming video support. At best, it can take a static
>> file and stream that from a URL, but there's no support for streaming
>> mutable content like an rtsp:// stream. A further complication is
>> Apple's insistence that developers cannot access the framebuffer.
>>
>> The first issue could be remedied through live transcoding before
>> streaming to the device. This isn't implemented yet, but is possible.
>> The second issue is a much higher hurdle. Without the ability to play
>> streaming content within the SDK, the only way this could work is
>> through software decoding and playback through either a quartz
>> graphics layer or an opengl layer. I've never written any rendering
>> software but I know it's possible. My question is: would the iPhone be
>> powerful enough for a reasonably encoded stream to be played back? By
>> reasonable, I'm thinking standard mpeg-2 or the mpeg-4 encoding, but
>> keeping in mind that I'll have no access to the hardware acceleration
>> already present on the iPhone.
>
>
> Have you seen this?
>
> http://code.google.com/p/mythtv-for-iphone/
>
> Kevin
>
>
> That will only work with streaming static, recorded content. A
> live-streaming implementation is needed to be able to watch live tv
> playback.
>

"Live" streaming is only streaming a recording in progress.  It shouldn't be
that hard to browse the guide, kick off a recording, and then streaming
that.

Kevin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-dev/attachments/20080721/95221c10/attachment.htm